Jay Phillips, the VP of R&D at Voxeo, talks about how ecosystems, not isolated projects, are what makes technologies thrive.  Jay talks about how telephony-based application development has yet to see the game-changing effects of open source collaboration that have dramatically altered the development and distribution of software in the last 10 years. 

He talks about how the era of a single dominant programming language has given way to a diverse ecosystem of programming languages made possible by open source collaboration.  According to Jay, technologists now maintain a working proficiency in a variety of languages and choose the language best suited for a given engineering challenge or codebase.

With the prevalence of the Java Virtual Machine and Microsoft's Dynamic Language Runtime, all VM-compatible languages have access to a wide array of hardware as well as the entire ecosystem of libraries of the other languages that can run on that VM. Jay talks about how the Adhearsion telephony framework leverages open source and virtual machine-oriented programming languages with the aim of becoming a developer-friendly framework upon which a new ecosystem of open source telephony applications will be built.