A Farewell to SIP

The IETF SIPPING meeting today in San Francisco was probably my last SIP meeting. There is nearly 10 years since I started my first implementation of SIP – a lot more followed and two of them still exist today (thankfully vastly improved by other developers since) , in Virtual Office and in Packet8.

I was enthusiastic about SIP from the very beginning, which was not surprising after having to work with H.323. I understood very quickly how SIP offered way more possibilities than the PSTN, and I anticipated the same revolution for real time communication that happened at the same time with the Web. So I waited, and waited and… nothing came. Where was my universal communicator? All I can see was the same old telecoms model transposed, as if the Internet had the same constraints than a bunch of relays, jacks and copper cables. My forte is on the server side but with nothing coming I decided to have a shot at it, and this is how the Zap project started. Unfortunately the Zap project is now without sponsor so I will probably never see it finished as I envisioned it.

SIP always had some flaws in its design, but for a long time I thought that simply ignoring them was enough. The problem is that this flaws were what helped the telecoms to implement their crap in the exact the same way than on copper – my latent paranoia makes me suspecting that this flaws were introduced for this very reason but, in application of Hanlon’s Razor, this is probably just plain stupidity. The net result is that the end-users lost, and the telecoms won.

I think that there is some lessons to learn from this failure. Don’t let the IETF design a protocol, there is too much big money influence to have a protocol that serves the end-users. Instead design the best protocol possible, write some FOSS code for it, give free access to servers running it, grow the end-user base and then, and only then, go to the IETF to standardize it. The small but powerful academic population of the IETF will probably be on your side and the big money population will have very little possibility to fuck up the protocol, as the IETF is a pragmatic organization.