I'm at Astricon 2009, the Asterisk Development conference. Asterisk is an internet based, free phone system. Quite an interesting crowd of open source developers, solution providers, VOIP resellers, and hardware manufacturers; about 500 persons in total. Chris DiBona of Google gave the keynote this morning and focused on Open Source. He pointed out that the majority of time that Google is interested in a technology company that they fund/support the company to get to a stable build and then make it available to the entire Open Source community. There are somewhere around 32 billion lines of open source code; a code base that will outgrow and out-maneuver most proprietary software applications. Ironically Google does not use Asterisks; Google Voice is a proprietary application that is specifically works of off Google's core servers; which Asterisk will not. So much for embracing open source! I've been hanging out in the Coders Zone most of the day. The breadmaker a...