Why is proprietary hybrid-hosted VoIP 'very evil'?

Mark Spencer: A lot of this is a bit of a hyperbole in terms of the scale I try to put things in. Are the lines quite so black and white? But the biggest problem with hybrid-hosted as it is currently implemented is that it actually takes away even more choice from the customer than a traditional proprietary product. The reason for that is that under a hybrid-hosted model, the ability to control the system is removed from the customer and placed in the hands of the vendor. So when you think about it, open source is trying to move things to where there is customer control; the hybrid-hosted model is that you really don't even have access to your configuration information because it's all held there. If they change what the feature set is or how it's presented, you don't really have any choice about how to use that. It's not so much that the hosted model itself is inherently bad; there's certainly a lot of technical benefit to having a hosted environment. It's an easy way to get started. But it is, I think, dangerous to customers not to be able to get out of it if they outgrow the sise that makes sense or if they become unhappy with that vendor. They're really locked in even more than they are with a traditional proprietary vendor.

Do you think there are certain companies for which it is more or less dangerous? The hybrid-hosted model seems most beneficial for SMBs, which don't have the staff or the desire to manage the phone system in-house; they just want to pay somebody and have it work.

Spencer: I think that it's one of several models that can work for an SMB. Some SMBs like to have premise-based solutions if they're cost-effective enough, and some SMBs want to have something that's hosted; I mean, it just kind of depends on the company. But when your SMB starts to turn into more of an enterprise, as you start to grow, that's when this starts to be an acute problem because you're really locked in to this vendor in a way that's very difficult to break away from.

And not only that, but what you see in the product today may or may not be what the product is tomorrow. Think about how many people have used Windows XP, and now you have Windows Vista that's come out. Imagine if all of a sudden Microsoft changed it so that when you went to your computer it was now running Vista because they thought that was the better system. Think about how many people really don't like Vista right now. If your operating system were hosted, you really wouldn't have a choice. Whatever the person hosting it decided you should have is what you'd have. It just doesn't feel like a safe model for someone who's used to the open source world, where you have a tremendous amount of control.

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