FWIW, our plan for PhoneGnome is to be open. That said, we are a private company and we could always be acquired and the new owner could change the rules, so point still applies.

We've started off on the "open" front to interoperate with anybody else that's willing via SIP and ENUM, or through other peering means. That's more than many others do. We're implementing to standards wherever they are available and we're ready to move to standards where we have not yet been able to, once there are viable standards for those areas.

We will also offer more "openess" in the form of APIs and other such in the future (watch this space).

Aswath, you say there could be a "software" version of PhoneGnome, but then you say "most of the computers have a modem, which could be used for PSTN calls." That sounds like hardware to me. PhoneGnome in a card, instead of a little blue box. :-) And our little blue box uses a lot less power and generates a lot less heat than a PC and a modem! :-)

"Live by word, die by word." David, yes you caught me. :-)

Good points. What I meant was that the PhoneGnome device is a cool idea and it does pretty neat stuff. But that this is not any kind of open device in so far as it could be freely licensed by anyone or built into Linux or whatever (it is open in the sense of using SIP, etc.). PhoneGnome as a device is owned by a private firm and if it takes off, what is to say this is not the next Linksys? (Maybe I am just overcome by acquisition fear, what with all the rumors in the blogsphere of Skype shopping itself to buyers.) Cisco has been pretty good with Linksys but you just never know what direction something will take. I wish the PhoneGnome guys all the success in the world -- it is a pretty cool device that solves some real user problems. And you have to hand it to anyone that lets you call other people with SIP URIs directly.

I don't seem to understand what the big deal is... The PhoneGnome "device" is a Sipura SPA-3000 with a few tweaks on the server side and maybe the device side. How is this a huge secret? If you read the SPA-3000 manual, and you have some Asterisk experience you can create the same exact thing.