The VoIP revolution - Blink

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