Mark Spencer gave a riveting keynote today where he discussed his poor experiences in international travel and tied it into how open source communications will allow customers to solve their own problems. Open source is most valuable for consumers as open source developers need to earn the business every day. Spencer addressed a lunchtime crowd of hundreds of domestic and international executives in a standing room only ballroom at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Mark went on to say that it would be great to apply open source principles to airline travel so instead of having to wait in line to change a cancelled a flight and subsequently missing other flights, you can make the changes yourself.

Spencer focused on the strengths of open source and mentioned that the community of developers and the resellers can improve upon their product if they like. For example, IBM has a version of Asterisk that is designed for extremely high availability.

Questions from the audience directed Mark to address what he thinks of router based Asterisk implementations. Spencer said he is thrilled to see Asterisk showing up in places he wasn’t even aware of.

He received a question about DUNDi which Mark answered by explaining how phone systems will be federated allowing the various servers to be redundant to one another. An extension in one place becomes an extension on the network. DUNDi will allow various directory services to interoperate without giving out too much personal information Spencer said. The VPF or Voice Peering Fabric can use this concept to allow free directory services so you aren’t forced to use paid services he mentioned.

In all, Spencer was at his best and the audience loved his presentation as evidenced by the questions after the session.