Welcome to the NGI Zero podcast where we talk to the people who are building the Next Generation
Internet.
Hi, I'm Ronny Lam.
And I'm Tessel Renzenbrink.
We both work for NLnet, a foundation which financially supports people working on free
and open source technologies.
Our guest today is Adrian Georgescu.
He is the founder and CEO of AG Projects, a company committed to open source telecommunications.
For many years Adrian has worked on Sylk Suite, an open source multi-party conference tool.
And before Sylk, there was Blink.
We'll be talking about both these projects today.
Hi Adrian, nice to have you here.
Hello Tessel, hello Ronny.
Thank you for inviting me to this session.
We have devised a list of questions to get to know our guests quickly.
They are three short questions.
So Firefox or Brave web browser?
This is like voting left or right, the outcome is the same.
You didn't answer yet.
Firefox.
Okay, vampires or zombies?
This is the type of, I have a third option, none of them.
Okay, telephone or telegraph?
Blink.
Good, yeah.
So you work on communication systems.
What key issues do you see in this field?
This field has been spawned while internet expanded beyond its original goal, I guess.
There was what we call in our niche the VoIP revolution.
This happened a while ago when the telecommunications market has been liberalized in Western Europe
and beyond.
Internet connections became fast enough to accommodate real-time communications and that's
when internet started to grow beyond the e-commerce and email and messaging systems to what we
have today, these video conferencing applications.
Actually it was Voice over IP, the first real-time application that emerged to be ported from
the old telecom network to the internet and this VoIP revolution, I was part of it and
it helped me discover my own success by riding this wave.
So I was early and I had the luck to have a good mentor.
That is Henry Sinnreich, who was perceived in the community as the godfather of Voice
over IP because he was instrumental in funding the first open source projects related to
Voice over IP worldwide.
I got to know this part of the industry, the emerging industry, very early on and I was
part of those first creators that made Voice over IP work based on internet principles,
which is something I would like to mention because internet was built based on certain
principles, one of them being the end-to-end principle, which means that the network should
be kept as simple as possible and servers should be doing the least amount of work possible
and most of the work and the application should be developed in endpoints, the network being
a transparent carrier for whatever the applications in the endpoints are meant or supposed to
do.
And this end-to-end principle was embedded into the products of mine and other companies
who stuck to this principle as opposed to others who tried to do the opposite, putting
a lot of functionality in the network and letting the end user with very little choices
and no transparency to what happens in the central part of the internet.
So how does Sylk contribute to addressing those issues?
When the end-to-end principle was such that email is the best example of a software that
its principles are today, you can verify that the principles applied during email are still
valid today because we're still using emails after so many years.
When Voice over IP became an issue, the way to make it interoperable and making a standard
so that everyone can implement solutions that talk to each other.
The IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, created a working group which eventually led
to the creation of this protocol called SIP, which stands for Session Initiation Protocol,
which was basically copying from the success of email and HTTP.
It is a simple protocol to develop around.
It could be reusing the existing email and HTTP models.
It was a predictable success and it is a success.
SIP protocol is being embedded into any telecommunication backbone there is in the world.
Any cable operator uses SIP protocol at the base, though they don't advertise it as such.
The protocol was and still is a success, but less for the end users who don't get the immediate
benefits of using SIP because they are being offered services by companies like cable operators,
fiber providers, and they are given an address typically in the form of a phone number.
They are not told that they are using SIP and they can't even make use of all the features
of the SIP protocol because of the business aspect of using this.
The companies just replaced telephony in place of letting SIP being used for what is originally
designed for any type of session, including video, presence, chat, file transfers, any
type of real-time communications between end users.
Today we see still telephony being as the main application and our company, since we
started, we were dedicated to make SIP a success the way the protocol is envisaged, meaning for
applications beyond VoIP and we're the first company that being committed to that we really
implemented most, if not all, the specifications from the IETF related to establishing sessions
beyond VoIP, namely chat, messaging, file transfer, conferencing, video calls, and we
had this very early on when nobody could even use them because of lack of deployments, lack
of bandwidth, lack of everything.
However, the software, when IETF proposes ideas and working groups are drafting plans and
specifications and standards.
It's always usable and useful to have an implementation to prove or disprove the attempted
tracks and we were one of the companies who were instrumental in proving that some ideas
were good and others were wrong, being involved close into the standardization and by means of
creating software that implemented those specifications very early on while actually
developing those specifications.
Sylk is actually the second generation of software our company worked on.
Initially it was Blink, which was a pure SIP client.
There was SIP and nothing else.
SIP protocol became complicated.
Other things were necessary to do things that the protocol alone could not do.
So other protocols emerged like there was an ecosystem around SIP and things were created
around SIP to help SIP achieve the deliverables that were initially aimed for could not be
achieved because there was more work required and more parts and other protocols were necessary
to complete a picture.
And Blink was a pure SIP client doing everything SIP and then the limitations of the SIP protocol
started to appear while more complex applications started to emerge.
For instance, this video conference we have right now practically is not possible to do
in SIP because SIP has no primitives that can allow you to develop multi-party conferencing,
not in a way that makes sense.
So SIP stopped short at a point where video became successful and people started to adopt
video calls, especially in video conferencing format.
SIP stopped at end-to-end, peer-to-peer, one-to-one calls and beyond that,
standardization didn't help but rather the opposite.
So the end result was that there was no SIP implementation doing video conferencing,
multi-party anywhere that made any sense at all technically and otherwise.
And the alternative was provided by the web working groups which were not inside IETF but
other people that leveraged the success of the web basically completed what SIP was missing,
which is WebRTC, which added real-time media to web browsers and basically it became suddenly easy,
not by standards but by adoption of certain pieces of code to make video conferencing possible
in a web browser, which was not possible in a SIP protocol using the tools and the standards
available were simply not doable.
So Sylk came to join together these two worlds whereby SIP protocol can be used for what it does
best, namely addressing in the form of an email address and using your own domain, you can have
an identity which makes sense, a user@domain and then connect it to all the media that people
may need, namely voice over IP, video, chat, but also the missing part, multi-party video
conferencing, how do you do that with a SIP client?
Well you can't, however, as I said, Sylk is supposed to be interoperable and for all the
new features it's using WebRTC and for compatibility purposes it's using SIP protocols so you are
always reachable in the best way that the client can support while negotiating a session with
anyone that may call you on that address using SIP protocol and while using the same application
like Sylk you can of course enjoy features particular to it, namely multi-party conferencing
which is always, how do you say, locked to your, how do you say, not vendor but solution, there is
no interoperable multi-party video conferencing solution that I know of so if you're on Zoom
there is no way to join with another client, there is no way to, because there is no standard,
standards became too complicated, too many people got involved and it ended up that video party
multi-party conferencing it's not something standard... standardisable, so we ended up with
multitude, a plethora of solutions to allow the users to do this and no standard way of
interconnecting between them. Sylk is doing the same as it's not a weakness we could fix, it's
inheriting the same model whereby you can start a video conference inside Sylk with other participants
and then if you want to make a regular session one-to-one you can do it with anyone that supports
SIP protocol worldwide with other solutions that implement SIP protocol and this is where they are
alike or not alike the solutions. Blink is design-wise it's an application based on the
you could say legacy paradigm. Web development changed the way interfaces look like a lot
in the past you had different operating systems with user interfaces that looked in a certain way
now you see a sort of standardization whereby all the application looked the same in a webish way
in Blink it's a standard legacy type of software whereby we used standard desktop
development and standard the widget set that is present on the natively on each computer
so Blink is an interface that looks native on each desktop you use whether it's Linux or Mac
or Windows whereas Sylk it's a cross-platform product based on these new principles of the web
development so it looks the same everywhere but doesn't look native anywhere so this is the
world we live in today. It's interesting to hear what you're saying is that the telephone
companies are selling us telephone connections when actually they are going over SIP already
for decades. 100% yes only SIP they don't advertise it but it's whenever you make a phone call from
your telephone it's in the server side it's a SIP server and your phone is a SIP device restricted
to do only on audio call. When I listen to your story I think you really made
WebRTC and SIP work together they go yeah hand in hand so to say
do you know any... are you the first are there any other applications that do it this well?
With Blink definitely there was no we were the best and still are the I don't know about any
other SIP client that aimed so high and achieved so much especially with the help of NLnet and
other sponsors in the past. The real problem in my field of work meaning if you want to have a
business and live from the fruits of your labor it's very hard because you compete with
big companies that offer a free service that does what your software does but the question comes
how do you live if Google gives you an alternative to make VoIP calls and Apple does the same and
WhatsApp and all these companies that have thousands of developers and gives you something
for free I'm not even sure why is there an expectation that any small company can be
successful of doing the same with a few people in terms of revenues or success as a business
I don't know how we wouldn't be successful had we just tried to monetize this SIP clients or
Sylk clients because you compete with big names that offer a similar product which
is properly maintained over years they have a lot of engineering support for it so it's a lost
battle in the sense of trying to make money with something which is free. However knowing this
again my company was able to position itself in a way that was able to maintain over time competing
in this sense with large companies that have infinite resources between codes for this end
user applications while having revenue from a different source same as us. Our company AG
projects our source of revenue is maintenance that we do for telecom operators we also develop the
server side for all these things that in the case of SIP you have a client but there is a server
as well and these servers is a product that companies are ready to pay for and they have a
budget for it and they have a maintenance budget for it and this is how our company was able to
survive over time in order to build this for the end user free SIP clients like Blink and Sylk
Again that development effort is huge because it's very complicated most of the internet
is involved when you build such a client there are so many subparts and moving parts under
the hood that you really have to be very knowledgeable and need to have people with
the right experience to make it work as opposed to a simple application doing one little task
If you look in under the hood of a complex application that does real-time communication
its complex. So these people are hard to find and of course not cheap to build in the end such a
software. We could do it because we had alternative sources of income and even so with those was not
enough. Meaning that the effort is so high that without the help of NLnet and others alike, it
is not possible to maintain and develop further a software that even after 14 years still works
properly and it's up to date and still downloaded and used and validated by anyone who tries to use
it has only good things to say about it. So this is a long-term effort that we're able with the help
of NLnet in principle because they were the main sponsors over the years. And then my company during
the idle financing was carrying forwards and continuing to maintain things over time so that
things keep working and it's not just a dead project in a trench somewhere like many projects
end up. After a short period of funding they just disappear and they just vanish because of lack of
adoption or lack of support or lack of passion of somebody who maintains them. We did this long-term
support and I'm proud of this personally. When I traveled back to my first office - it was last week -
I found an old laptop, Del Inspiron laptop running Windows somewhere in a drawer. I picked it up and
i tried to use it. It was from 2011 still worked I started it but I could not do anything with it. I
could not read my emails, could not browse the internet. Everything was incompatible but I
started Blink and I called my mother and it still worked. So this tells you something about the tools
that IETF standardized and the way we do things that they are, how do you say, not timeless but
resist long time. And this is one of the things that I'm very proud of that after so many years
it still serves its purpose. I think this also taps into another question that I would have,
and this is not only related to the VoIP world but also to email,
how is it possible to be a sustainable software company with open source software in this
world of Big Tech. Like you said there are those those Big Tech companies they have a
whole lot of developers, they have a lot of money and it's up to you with, well, less developers, less
money to draw the competition. So how do you make it sustainable? Is that only by
other revenue sources? Is that only possible with grants? Well in my case the
grants were not enough. And my company income dedicated for this part was also not enough. So
somehow in my case I can definitely say that without both I could not have, for instance, just
with NLnet I would not have been able to pull it off. It's just too much cost and there are unforeseen
you know R&D is such that it's hard to predict the outcome. And you have to explore things that
may have never been done before. And then you don't know how long it takes. So you may make a plan but
you just run into unknown and then if you don't have resources, you basically lose all the investment
at that point. So it's very hard with just one source of income it's definitely a big
risk. With two it's better. The more you have... We had even a third source of income. We put one of
the apps in the Mac app store where we asked money for it. Though there was a free version available
for those who bothered to download the software from dangerous places like an website.
This is something that it's so strange people yeah prefer to download it from the Apple store
because it's more safe and pay for it because they think it's better but it's the same software.
That helped but not much as well so the self revenues were never large enough to matter in
the great scheme of things. Were too minimal to matter. But still everything adds up. So in the end
because there is this persistent usage and the number of downloads is constant or growing or
people buy it or you see there is constant demand for it. So when you see that and if you spend time
doing it, you'll maintain it because it's your baby, so you don't want to see it dead. But that's of
course because also I like what I do. A lot of people just follow the funding available without
caring much about the outcome. And of course this matters. If you like what you do and if you really
would do it even without the funding, for instance. It's different if it's a hobby or it's... So it
depends on the person and the developer whether they can complement all these restrictions
that appear. What general advice would you have for other open source
companies to build a sustainable model? Well, that's like claiming I know what I'm doing.
Business-wise I never had any clues. So I just follow my instincts. I don't have business plans,
loans and my company was always cash flow positive and nobody taught me
how to do it so I don't know how to give advice to other people because I have no plan I just
use my instincts my instinct seems to be working and then that's very hard to answer questions.
Well yeah, well, that's also honest. I mean
yeah, maybe your instincts are good. Well they are as it as it turns out. But do understand correctly
that the fact that Sylk is still alive is basically because you are so dedicated to it,
that you will just continue to keep it... Yes, as long as I can I will. However, a
little observation, this is actually Blink you should ask about because that's the old one. Let's
say the old, the first one. Which is the pure SIP client. Sylk is very fresh, new and up to date with
everything. Mobile and everything. So far from being over with it, it's like at the beginning of...
it's still in its infancy in terms of usage and the growth and adoption. So the real issue
is Blink because some people may say that it's an obsolete piece of software which I totally disagree
with. Just because, you know, it's like the cars today. They all suck. You want a nice looking car,
that feels like a car you look for an older car that was a car. Today the
principles of building cars have changed to the point of building an iPad and putting wheels
around it. But that's not the car. That's something else. Same with everything. Beauty matters and
classic things properly done never die. So we think Blink is the same and we try to maintain
it very pure in sense of coding and the libraries and everything we use. It's still a
a piece of software that made sense in 2009 and makes sense today if you start inspecting the code.
So the code is written in such a way that is timeless. And as long as the
support for the operating systems do not vanish, meaning in the end is based upon a programming
language that of course may become obsolete over time, there's nothing you can do about that one for
instance. But still the building blocks are pretty well alive and kicking. So there is no way that
there is any obstacle in the near-term in the sense of survivability. And then the features
matter. You try to be on par with the big boys which you can't because simply lack of funding
and engineers and so forth. However things got so good that in the end a lot of features built
nowadays are just not necessary and some companies just innovate for the sake of doing something
though they shouldn't. So in this sense we don't have this problem. When we reach a level of
maturity that we we like then we just keep it working without aiming to you know change it
unnecessarily. So we leached we reached a level of maturity that requires conservation and
incremental updates rather than completely retweaking, rechanging, changing everything. So
we're very happy because it's comfortable to maintain something that makes sense, is beautiful,
works fine you just add a few things. It's a pleasure, pleasureful work. And this is Blink. So
it's a legacy piece of software that we keep it up to date in perfect shape. And thanks to
NLnet we can bring it back to Windows. Because of lack of resources and lack of
developers that over time we lost, there was a Windows version but at some point there was
not anymore because we just couldn't do it. We didn't have the people and the time to maintain
that part, that version. And we will be able to do this fall to bring Blink back to Windows
because now it's available for Mac and Linux only. And with the help of NLnet we will be able to
make it cross-platform truly again like it originally was for all three major desktop
platforms. And again it's hard to know how to monetize this especially on Windows, I don't know
if it's possible. And the goal also of NLnet is to allow for the software to be distributed purely
in open source form and it's a condition of funding so I don't aim or plan to monetize
necessarily Blink for Windows. So I don't know where it goes with this monetization of open
source it's a difficult story. Again our story works because we have server side software that
we monetize which indirectly funds the client side. And the client side helps as a marketing tool
if - this could be an advice - whenever you leave, you give something for free, you can...
In my company making free software that you publish it's like doing a marketing activity.
People know you're knowledgeable in that area, so it's like a business card that
people know and then when they need a solution for the server side they don't say: "but Adrian
what do you know to do in this area?" They all know that I know because our software stands
proof for the claims. How about the community behind Sylk is it only you as your company
working on it? Is there an active community behind it? Right, there is a community but I
wouldn't say developers. I mean the contributions can be seen on Github. We publish the software
and all the patches. The authors that contributed over time. But the external contributions are
a minimum to the level of patches and small changes. The heavy lifting still belongs to our company and
developers dedicated full time for it. Because as I said, it's a complex task,
takes time and it's... you need the proper individuals to even attempt to make a change to a software
that is very complex. So in reality it's only our company developing it. And people using it may
find, you know, little improvements, helping with translations and things that are marginal, in terms
of there are no new functions that are very seldom happened or almost none that people added a
feature but they did provide the fixes and things that we embedded back into the software
with corrections and things that were discovered by end users. So the community really when I...
To answer your question, the community in our case would be the SIP community. And the server side,
which is related to OpenSIPS project, which is the server side of things. In order to make a SIP
client or also webRTC client you need the correspondent server part. And without having
that properly, how do you say, properly in place, you will fail to build a client because it's not just
reading a spec and writing some software. You need a working server that would answer to all the
requests your application is sending. And without having the server side ready and properly working,
you cannot attempt to build a client. And actually this is the reason why our client works, because
before even attempting to build a client, we had the server working properly. So everything we build
in the client we could test accordingly and correct and fix. Whereas without having the
counterpart, the server side, you cannot do it. Because it's impossible to just
do it blindly with no actual proof it works. You need a server. Now in case this community
of OpenSIPS goes back to the first open source project related to voice over IP.
It was a project spawned by Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin. It was called SIP Express Router at the
origin. And Fraunhofer Institute had director at the time who was looking for new ideas. That's
back in time when Telecom was being contemplated being moved over the internet. And
there were no standards… well, there were standards but there were no implementations, actually.
Not in the open source domain. There were companies implementing standards but those were the old
Telecom companies like Ericsson, Siemens and nothing in the open source domain and Fraunhofer
Institute allocated a budget for developing the first SIP server in open source model. The director
was a person of Romanian origins. And then he contacted his old friends in Bucharest and for
this reason alone this project ended up full of Romanians. That's why I was also sort of around
there perhaps. So Henry Sinnreich the mentor of this SIP Express Router project. Well actually, he helped
guide the Fraunhofer ideas where to actually direct their development and R&D. So Henry was
basically giving the clues. Then Fraunhofer spawned this software called SIP Express Router which, then,
there were spin-offs, commercial ones, that took this software and made implementations
in the market with it. Several companies did it. It became a success and it became the reference
implementation of any operator that has SIP. Maybe they don't like to show it but I'm sure
the developers and the people supporting can tell you: ‘Like yeah, of course, we still run
SIP Express Router’, or a variant of it. Though they don't want to say too much about it. So the project
emerged to be a success and this success helped also indirectly Blink. Because this community
was present in many places at conferences, exhibitions and this ecosystem helped SIP
protocol become obviously successful as well. And implicitly Blink and other software we
created over time was present there and people knew us and then the community helped. That we
all... all the companies present in this ecosystem benefited, including mine. So there was a
complementary function in this ecosystem rather than competition. So Blink has no competition. I
don't know any SIP client that can attempt to claim they have the same feature set. There are
SIP clients but typically VoIP only or maybe they add another feature. But ours has all the features
from the IETF working group. So it's the only one that has, or claims, to have the IETF working group
stamp on. We did everything they standardized with SIP in the client. What besides working on
the Windows client, what are the next steps for your project? Well, right now in the
past couple of months, to attempt to actually do a Windows client, we had to
bring the software up to date with the latest things that are today the dependencies on
every computer. Over time they get modernized and you get to another version, namely QT framework
which is the building block for Blink Qt which is the Linux and Windows version of Blink.
This changed a lot so we had to basically redo a lot of the GUI elements. We had to
basically port all the code that was originally written on Qt, I don't know, when we started this was
Qt2 and now we are at Qt6. And there's a lot of work and heavy lifting to keep up with these changes.
So, that was eating a lot of effort and we spent three months doing this. And now the software... just,
we plan to make the first release, still on Linux. But we have all the
code ported so it's compatible with Qt6. And then aim to have the building for Windows
becomes possible. Because otherwise it wouldn't be. We could not just take the old code and make
a build for windows. So plans after we do this, we're not there yet so we still
work and we are still aiming for doing the Windows release. So this is the immediate things we're
involved with. And I don't aim to dare where to go after that. Because I have my hands full already
with this. So first step is to do the last release of Qt5 version which is still available on most
Linux systems. But this year all new linux versions will have Qt6 as the default. So then immediately
after we wrap with the old Qt5 legacy, we will almost be ready to go to the release for Qt6. Qt6 itself
is not really ready to be released properly. It lacks skins for different operating systems, you
have less flexibility in terms of, how do you say, it's a new thing but it's a future proof thing.
Or well as future proof as you can make things for the next couple of years. So Qt6 is not really
ready to be production ready but probably end of the year, next year it will be the de facto
user interface widget block there is. So our software aims to be ready for it while we do
this iteration. So when we do the Windows build, we will also have the Linux and the first incarnation
of Mac based on this tool set. Because Blink had a different Mac source code, written differently. And
with Qt now you can be really cross platform for all three operating systems. So you have the
same code base on Linux, Mac and Windows. Whereas in the past we had Linux and Windows with the
Blink Qt version and Mac had another version. And still has it which I'm afraid it will
reach end of the line because of the conditions imposed by Apple. This is one of the things we
are also battling with these ecosystems controlled by these large companies. They force you to
make choices or to give up on traces based on their own interest. And suddenly you hit the wall,
your software is not allowed in the App Store anymore because you cannot be compliant because
of reasons outside of your control. And I suspect the same will happen to the Blink Cocoa version
at some point. Apple store will simply not allow it because the lack of support for Python language
and the fact that the developers don't want to use it anymore in Mac, the Apple developers, I mean.
They force you to basically dump your software because you can't fix the whole Apple libraries
which are closed source that don't support various things anymore. And suddenly you update your
computer and your software is dead. And there is no documentation at all and if you discover what the
problem is, you have no support from Apple about it. They don't care and they force you to migrate
in a different direction. Whereas the Qt seems to be going into the right direction, they have
proper support on all platforms. So in the end probably Blink will be one version on all three
operating systems. Now we still have two of them as I said. There is a Blink Qt version and
a Blink Cocoa we call the native macOS incarnation of Blink. And Linux and Windows
version based on a different widget set the Blink the Qt framework. Any considerations for
iOS or Android clients or is that world already full of SIP clients?
Well we did it, Sylk is a SIP client for both. Sylk as a client works on Apple and Android phones
alike. So Sylk is not just a desktop solution but a mobile as well. And this is again where we
stopped with Blink, in the sense of mobile developments, because it was a no-go because of
the choice of the programming language namely Python. Python is not supported on
mobiles. There is no Python anything on mobiles so basically it's not possible. It was not possible
after starting the original desktop version to move towards mobile at the same software because
it's impossible. And this is where, again, Sylk took a different approach and used the
ools and the programming languages that were, how to say, properly supported in both sides,
meaning Android and Apple.
There is a React framework that is able to help developers to build once for both. So using this
I built the Sylk Android version the Sylk iOS version and they still work fine. They are okay
with their feature set which is less limited than well a WhatsApp or... But again it's with the amount
of people and funding we did pretty well so far. It's an application that works and you can have
features like replicated messages across multiple devices both desktop and mobile encryption end-to-
end. A lot of good features that are hard to find in a similar project. And video conferencing from
mobile and desktop with the limitations that are in the software. We're not perfect. But it's a
perfectly workable solution for small groups. And you have the source code for everything and it's
no surprise there. It's easy to inspect it, audit it, and you know what it does. As opposed to using
other solutions that are black boxes and you don't know what happens to your data. Interesting and
a recommendation, I think, for small groups to move to a private and and safe platform.
Right. Yeah, which is probably a good bridge to a more general question. Because you have
shown multiple ways in which there's actually a really beautiful standard and beautiful
implementations but the the surrounding stuff of people wanting to commercialize it, or own it, or
make it proprietary software, make it actually... take the good stuff and make it worse.
Do you have any hopes, do you see any any ways, that this is going to take a different turn now?
That either users or Big Tech are… I'm not sure. I'm a bit pessimistic because
one of the issues we see is that a few players can decide overnight to change direction in ways
that you you cannot do from your level. So we're all using this similar platforms that have similar
interests. These cloud providers namely Google, Apple, all these people that we rely on them for
our computers to run at all nowadays. They force upon us various changes that at the developer
level you cannot change them. You have to go one, two levels up where policies are being made and
carefully analyzed to see if it makes sense or not to do things that are being imposed on many of us
One of the issues that I consider harmful is the misuse of secure identities today. We all claim
we want that and there is a need for encryption but after all is said and done we end up with…
the outcome is that for the end user suddenly it has, how do you say, is being just tracked all over
the place. And while encryption is a good thing a lot of things don't have…. shouldn't even be encrypted.
If I want to broadcast news, I don't need to have an encrypted session to, I don't know, a
newspaper where they just, I don't know, just share the same information. And by imposing these TLS
certificates everywhere, it becomes a nuisance to surf the web. All these certificates introduce a
level of, they say security, but in the end, for the end user, ends up not being able to surf websites
which are too old, they don't have the right certificate, and all these pop-ups that show up
on your computer with things that nobody understands. I have to, you know, it's just... they're meant to
scare you, so you just always go for their choice, to do their stuff, accept their conditions.
And the people are slaves to this technology that is being controlled by few large players. And in
this sense I don't know how people at my level can change it. We did make the internet run but
now, once it runs, it's being taken over and hijacked by interests that are very high. And I don't know
if we have the stamina to go there and fight. Because it's, I don't know, it's a pretty big
battle and at my level I can't fight it because of lack of resources. But maybe to to add a little
glimpse of hope in there. I do get the impression that people are getting more aware of the problems
that it brings. And people in general and also governments and that there is already for a while
people are pushing back... There is of course people look for alternatives as far as they can. And they
do look and they do find alternatives. And we are such an alternative when it comes to real-time
communications. But it's still confined to the developer type of persons. People who are
aware because we marketed around SIP but nobody knows about SIP. People use a phone, they
don't even know about technical things. Then if you try to make it something that is user-friendly
- between quotes -suddenly it gets lost into the amalgam of other, similar solutions with small
descriptions that nobody knows what they do and how. For that, then again, you make a client which
doesn't... in the end looks the same like others. At least when you download it, or look at
description. You can't tell what's the difference and then then they have better marketing. So you're
lost there in trying to be normal, let's say, you get lost. Trying to become an expert in a certain
area works but then your audience is confined to the experts in your ecosystem or, I don't know,
people who are very tech-savvy and they say" 'Yes I want to have a SIP client where I understand my
data, how it works.' But then again the other people you are calling, they don't care about this.
They have WhatsApp and they don't want to change that even with telegram or other things. They just
have WhatsApp and for them it’s the end. It's too complex already. So I don't know how to
herd people in a certain direction when it comes to open source or open standards. It all makes
sense but the adoption is forced by the default app installed on your phone when you buy it.
So that's hard to fight, right? If you have a pre-installed application on a device you buy.
And a billion people buy the same, then which application do you think people will use? Mine?
No. So in this sense, I don't know, it's an uphill battle which is hard hard to win. Unless a third
party comes with a different ecosystem, different mobile phone, different choices for software. But
now you have none. You have Apple ecosystem and Google Android. And there is no other mobile
phone provider even or operating system that is worthwhile noticing out there. So how can you change
this. I can't change this. You can change it maybe. How would you do it. Well, again, to try to keep a
bit of a glimpse of hope here. One thing I find very important is... The worst thing in the world
is if you see a horrible problem and there is just you see no solution to it whatsoever. No
no road to walk, no perspective that you can take… There are and I don't want to take the
optimism... No, no, but that's where I'm going. It's like, people like you who are building
this stuff, even indeed when it's really hard to get it out there because of this unequal playing
field. For me, what gives me hope, is the fact that at least it's there, you
know. If somebody comes to the realization this is no longer what I want, then there is a your
projects but there's a whole host of stuff out there, that they can go to...
Right, so it's good, as you mentioned, it is it's good to be optimistic.
Don't take my pessimism... I'm looking specifically at my capabilities and my limitations. So I know
how much I can do. And then of course, knowing how far you might want to go but you can't, you feel
a bit frustrated. But of course, it's just a personal feeling it shouldn't be contagious.
Well, I from our part, think that you are doing an awful lot actually to contribute to
making this better, this problem… to addressing these issues. So maybe from your
perspective, it's a bit negative but from my perspective you are doing an awful lot. So
thank you for that. Yeah well, it's a compliment, thank you very much. And maybe on that note,
if the people who are listening to this podcast, if you.. What could they do to bring
Blink and Sylk further. I think that the software stands for itself. And if you want
to communicate over, let's say, you want something that works over time - look at email - you can have
the same address for email as for Sylk. And because it's based on a standard you probably
will still use it in 20 years. And I think this is, I’ll say, an advantage that many have missed,
or nobody has emphasized enough. So but then again, it's what do you do if your phone
number becomes your identifier. You know, you start the WhatsApp and it's your phone number.
Where is your address, where is…? And then you're stuck with that and you can't even move your
WhatsApp to another phone without great pain. And you're stuck in that ecosystem. With SIP you have
the flexibility to have many devices. And you have this feature called parallel forking which is
well SIP invented the fact that you can get called and accept the call in different places, at any
moment. This was a SIP invention this parallel forking feature. This appeared later,
much later, in WhatsApp on Telegram and other apps. But before you could not even do this. SIP
protocol is the one that made it, actually, deployed it the first time. And they copied from it and there
are a lot of things that SIP did right. And other did wrong, like with the video conferencing. So
yeah, it's it's good to have alternatives. And then the problem is that all these alternatives
had a lot... a short lifespan. And ours, we hope, it still has energy to go forward. And it did so far,
for many years. And this is something that is important... I don't want to change my
company programming language every six months. It's terrible. Same for communications, I don't want to
look for another set of tools every… And SIP is portable in the sense, if you have a...
Blink, again, is not the only one you can put your address into another client. This alone gives you
some sort of... how do you say, as an end user it gives you the freedom to use another
software if you want. And you're not obliged to use... you have the coupling between the address
and the client, it’s the same like your email address, yeah, you can put it in any email client on Windows
or on your mobile it still works, right? This philosophy doesn't exist outside our ecosystem.
What do you mean you take your address put it in another vendor’s SIP client and then you can call
again with the same things? This is only in SIP possible and because of this ecosystem made it
possible. The rest don't let you do that. If you have your WhatsApp identity you're not gonna
run away with that anywhere else. They force you to just... all your contact list is stuck there.
And of course, there are ways to import/export but there is no way to call a WhatsApp user from a SIP
account. So they all close their islands and they have their user base... And it is actually the only
way to cross this borders is by using SIP protocol, in reality. Anywhere there is any kind of
interconnection between whatever islands, closed islands of... they may even use SIP internally or
not, doesn't matter, the border is always SIP. To get the audio call or a video call carried across.
So again, SIP is omnipresent, a good choice, and is being adopted quite a lot.
But it's not advertised as such. So SIP it is a winner in this battlefield. But it's an invisible
player, nobody knows about it. But it is there, as a building block, as a client, as a server,
as an interconnect path between two islands of different solutions that need to interoperate
with each other. So in this sense SIP did win the battle. But it is not deployed as such inside
WhatsApp. Actually Apple themselves used SIP. I don't know today anymore but they had a SIP
client. They had face time running SIP. When the program crashed, you got a SIP dump out of it.
They didn't say they used SIP until people saw the softer crashing. But you see, SIP is adopted.
But then it's obfuscated by whomever is using it,tries to cover and hide it. So in this sense
SIP is the winner. People try to say that we don't use it but we know…
Well thank you very much for for unhiding SIP and showing it to us and giving it a... shining a little bit of light on it. Because it obviously deserves that.
Ronny, do you have any more questions? Well I think not, technically, because this was
a masterclass in SIP maybe. Yeah very interesting.
You also said multiple times that you were helped by the NGI funding
and that you could not do your work without the NGI funding. So yeah, we had a question there but
you answered that one already. But maybe, how would... what advice would you have for
other people who are considering applying for NGI funding? Well advice, I don't have advice, but the
reality is that a lot of funding is lost because, how do you say, no follow up and - but whose fault
is it. I mean you may have a good idea but how to monetize it, how to survive after initial
implementation. It's a problem for everyone. Advice... I remember starting my business. I was in amsterdam
with the KvK, the chamber of commerce, and there was this seminar about startups. And there was this
lady presenting and said like: 'You are all starting entrepreneurs' - and there are like probably a hundred
of us there - 'do you know how many of you will still be doing what you came here for, and your
business. And over one year time, how many of you will be still here?’ Or, no it was three years time.
And everyone said like, well, maybe 50 percent. In the end the lady said: ‘Only three of you will still
be doing what you aimed to do that you are here for today.’ Three out of a hundred and everyone booed
and everyone said: ‘No way, our ideas are the best and we will be successful.’ And you need that to
start. But then the reality is said a lot of things just don't have a future. They start but
they don't go too far. And then advice? How can you give advice in this direction? It's
a roller coaster. You have to observe… You have, first of all, to not just do things in a
vacuum. You have to find an ecosystem, where, how do you say, you're not alone. And to be
observed means there are others like you. So you cannot just be alone with the best solution in a
place where nobody else is. Because you'll not get noticed or… So whatever you do, try to find a
place where you have more people like you. And go there and try to see if there is a place for what
your idea is trying to achieve. So don't be alone, go find your community. Find the people
that are related to your field and try to get in there early. And especially if it's a growing
trend it's good to be there early. And then even if you're late it's still not bad. But try to find
a community where your solution fits. And try to start from there. Because funding alone will
not solve your problems, long-term. Yeah, well thank you. That's good advice. Okay well, from
our side I would say I'd like to say: thank you very much for this conversation. Thank you
for inviting me to this session.
end