A great post on why PoIP is not open, rather too closed. It's worth a broader discussion.

So I paid a not insignificant amount of money to hear marketing pitches from AT&T and Vonage, telling me how they are open and building open platforms. Open platforms that you and I can use after our snowball fight in hell. These are independent closed platforms that operate on a model like that of putting my own apps in my car, only after GM approves it and I make a business deal with GM.

Mike McCue said some great stuff, e.g. "What we want is the ability of anyone to write any application for the telephone."
As attendees asked about APIs and real web services platforms, like those being offered by Ebay, Amazon, Google, and others, we heard the Phone-over-IP (PoIP) folks first tell us they were already open (by their definition) and besides they will build all the applications we will ever need, so there is no need for a web services model. Example quote: "None of our customers are asking for a better 41 Mr Blog