That's a bit disingenuous. The API clients are open source. The actual service is not. If a developer builds on top of Tropo, they are locked into Tropo's pricing and servers. Same with Twilio.
If you want to be on the eye-bleeding edge of scalable VoIP, check out Whistle (http://www.2600hz.org/about-whistle/). Host your APIs (REST and AMQP), choose your carriers, and build your whapps on a completely open-source project. We will gladly host and/or manage your servers as well.
Whereas Twilio/Tropo/Plivio give you ways to manage just call handling, Whistle aims to expose phone provisioning, call handling, server and cluster management, and more. We are open sourcing the PBX tools, a trunking platform (see it live at http://store.2600hz.com), among others that are in development.
That said, we're really excited with plivio's release and hope to either work with them to integrate their app as a whapp on our platform, or fork the project and do it ourselves (if we ever have time)!
The core that actually runs your applications is open source. Runs on any java SIP servlet app server. You can run Tropo apps without touching Tropo.com at all or paying us for anything. There are a number of companies doing this today.
We did this precisely because we wanted to prevent lock in. We want your business, but if we suck, you should be able to go elsewhere.
If you want to be on the eye-bleeding edge of scalable VoIP, check out Whistle (http://www.2600hz.org/about-whistle/). Host your APIs (REST and AMQP), choose your carriers, and build your whapps on a completely open-source project. We will gladly host and/or manage your servers as well.
Whereas Twilio/Tropo/Plivio give you ways to manage just call handling, Whistle aims to expose phone provisioning, call handling, server and cluster management, and more. We are open sourcing the PBX tools, a trunking platform (see it live at http://store.2600hz.com), among others that are in development.
That said, we're really excited with plivio's release and hope to either work with them to integrate their app as a whapp on our platform, or fork the project and do it ourselves (if we ever have time)!