Freeside Internet Services: Doing Well With Purely Free Software (Video)

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While attending ITEXPO West in Austin, TX, Slashdot editor Timothy Lord met Ivan Kohler, the "President, Founder and Head Geek" of a company called Freeside Internet Services that is 100% open source (no dual-licensing) and makes its living supporting software Ivan says is used to manage some of the very unsexy backend tasks that ISPs and VoIP providers need to do, like track usage and send bills to customers. Freeside uses the AGPL license, which Ivan calls "a GPL variant for web applications" that, he says, "prevents people from taking our software, modifying it, and selling it in a hosted capacity as proprietary software."

Timothy Lord: ITEXPO billed itself as the World’s Communication Conference. The show floor is IP telephones, VoIP wholesalers and all kind of networking and communications gear. A lot of the phones and PBXes are actually based on the open source and GNU licensed Asterisk. What there isn’t, is much acknowledgment of open source, maybe everyone is afraid of giving away their secret sauce. I met with one conspicuous exception though.

Ivan Kohler is the President, Founder and Head Geek of a company based in Truckee, California called Freeside, which uses free software to manage some of the very unsexy backend tasks that ISPs and VoIP providers need to do, like track usage and send bills to customers.

Ivan talked with me about what open source has meant for him as an entrepreneur and programmer.

Ivan Kohler: My name is Ivan Kohler. I’m with Freeside Internet Services. We do billing for VoIP providers and ISPs and I’m the President, Founder and Head Geek. Unlike a lot of people here who make a lot of use of open source, everything from Linux to Apache to Asterisk, we put our product out there as open source as part of our marketing, so to speak. As tough as that is for a geek to say, we put our product out there as open source. We don’t have a commercial version at all. We have followed the Red Hat model where we sell consulting and support of the pure open source and it’s been great for us as a small company. It really lets us get the word out there and compete which much larger companies.

We use the AGPL license, which is a GPL variant for web applications. It prevents people from taking our software, modifying it, and selling it in a hosted capacity as proprietary software, and almost in all other respects is similar to the GPL. As you asked about, we brought in some other software packages that integrate with ours, RT (Request Tracker) and Torrus for bandwidth monitoring. Both of those packages are available under the GPL, which is AGPL compatible server. We’re able to put those things together and offer them in an integrated package.

What our software does is it provides billing, trouble ticketing, operations, mostly back office type operations for VoIP providers and ISPs. So, we’re rapidly converging to be one and the same, my ISP offers voice, so good two markets to be in.

Obviously, as a fairly small company ourselves, we do sell to a lot of small companies, but we do have a couple of big companies in the roster as well that help fund the development and keeping the software alive and actively develop. So, we do have a range, definitely a long tail of small folks.

We do get some contributions. As the company has grown, we’ve hired some of the core developers. So we get less contributions than we used to. We hired the best guys we could find who are our core developers, but one of our core developers does work for a separate company and gets paid by somebody else to work on our software. So we still are a project and haven’t hired them all yet and we do work with people from the community, contribute small things in patches, as well as our core developers.

I’m located on the West Coast in Lake Tahoe, California. My support director is in Louisiana. Our employees are everywhere from Pennsylvania on the East Coast. Out here in California, we use typical tools that geeks will be familiar with, IRC, email. We also have a phone system that makes it all appear as if we’re in one place, so I can pick up my phone and dial an extension of my guys in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, wherever they might happen to be.

We use stuff that’s very familiar to most people. I don’t use an ID. I use VoIP, Linux, web browser. It’s not a whole lot of esoteric stuff. We recently switched to Git for source tracking after sticking with CVS for long past its shelf life.

Timothy Lord: And is the Testerson family a typical customer?

Ivan Kohler: Definitely, from Test Town, USA. Here’s an example of some test packages we ordered for them, some residential VoIP test packages, phone number. In the VoIP world, a phone number is called a DID, don’t know why. I know what it stands for, but I don’t know why they don’t just call them phone numbers, but all the guys here, they call DIDs. So we got one phone number provision for this customer and then we have a sample invoice that we generated for them, showing the charges for the service, total balance due and so forth.

Re:Freeside Support

[Jawnn]

Agreed. We had the same experience - discovered that the software and documentation appeared to be deliberately rigged so that it was effectively useless, virtually requiring a payment for someone to show up with the keys and make it work. Were it not for the perfectly valid choice of "Fuck this. I'll use something else", we'd call that extortion. Yes, with enough time and expertise, one could discover where the broken bits are and fix them, but then (with enough time and expertise) one could write something from scratch too.

Re:Freeside Support

[_ivan]

Hi,

I am the person interviewed in this video.

It is a completely and utterly false statement that we attempt to make the software difficult to install on purpose. The documentation is resonably straightforward for any competant sysadmin, and all prerequisites ARE listed. The documentation is in a Wiki if folks from the community would like to help improve it for a more novice-oriented audience.

We even provide a completely installed and functional VMware appliance with each release, for folks who have difficulty installing from source code but who would still like to evaluate or use the software.

May I respectfully ask that you consider saving the vitrol for companies that ACTUALLY falsely represent themselves as "open source" while having pro versions, proprietary plugins and other such nonsense? It seems a bit unfair to pick on a small company doing the best we can to employ people full-time writing 100% free software, just because a free installation tutorial wasn't handed to you on a silver platter.

Thanks.