When I caught up with Sun CTO Bob Brewin a few weeks ago at AjaxWorld, I wasn’t expecting to talk about telephones. But that was exactly what Brewin had on his mind as he promoted Sun’s software stack for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), JavaFX.

That’s because JavaFX lets developers create programs that can be ported unchanged to PCs, music and video players, game consoles TV set-top boxes and…phones.

Kinda makes you think of the Apple iPhone. But Brewin is aiming higher than the iPhone, although he carries one. The iPhone is useful as an example of how to take a potentially good thing and miss the mark.

“Apple and ATT created this complete user experience and then they hamstrung it,” comments Brewin, referring to the fact that Apple strictly limits the programs that can run on the iPhone and, until recently, the device only worked on ATT’s mobile network.

“How long do you think that’s going to last?” he continues. “Already in Asia there are companies coming out with iPhone equivalents. What’s missing is the software. Coming from Sun, I’m a huge fan of open source and open standards. [Apple’s] walled garden approach has fundamental limits. In a year or two there will be a large number of competitors to Apple.”

Add up the facts that handset manufacturers are rushing to copy the iPhone, mobile carriers are looking to compete with the ATT/iPhone early entry advantage, and Sun’s JavaFX software that just happens to bring any application you want to a smartphone. It doesn’t take a genius to come up with…a Sun Phone.

Sun currently is testing handsets with mobile carriers and Brewin declines to talk about delivery dates other than to say “as soon as humanly possible.” Talk is that Sun is working with Samsung to develop the JavaFX phone, but no one is commenting.

But one thing consumers can count on: When it hits the market, the SunPhone will work with any carrier you want. And it will do VoIP out of the box.

Asterisk creator and sponsor Digium put the mass market squarely in its sights today with its acquisition of three year-old Asterisk PBX company Switchvox.

While Asterisk has earned a devoted following among technology experts, the formidable challenges of implementing the open source telephony system is a barrier to wide adoption. Earlier this year, Digium took a first step toward greater simplicity by introducing the AsteriskNow appliance. Now the company is adding to its portfolio a feature-rich turnkey PBX that claims 66,000 users (seats).

“If you look at where Asterisk has been adopted, it’s a technically sophisticated audience – system integrators and enterprises, organizations that have the telephony expertise and technology expertise to use Asterisk,” explains Digium CEO Danny Windham.

“We have been looking at things that are necessary to grow the business. The most important thing is making it easy to use – packaging it for small and medium sized applications. Switchvox has made it [Asterisk] really easy to use.”

Digium looked at about 30 different packaged PBX offerings before finally deciding on the Switchvox acquisition, according to Windham. “Switchvox had the most reliable product, the most functional product and the Switchvox team is culturally compatible.”

He points to the value-add that comes built-in with Switchvox’s product as significant customer benefits.

“Take the example of a small business, a real estate office running Switchvox PBX and a CRM system like Salesforce.com or SugarCRM. When the phone rings, the customer record in the CRM system is displayed. It also brings up Google Maps showing the caller’s location and opens up the caller’s URL. Before answering the phone you know who’s calling and the whole history.”

But does this move put into question Digium’s commitment to the open source community? An emphatic ‘no’ is Windham’s answer.

“Digium is spending more today to support the open source project than anytime in its history,” he says. “The stronger the [Switchvox] business is, the more resources we have to apply to open source projects.”

At the end of the day, Switchvox and Digium appears to be a marriage made in heaven, albeit a long distance marriage, as the Switchvox team will remain in San Diego as Digium’s western regional office.

“We believe Asterisk is the most popular open source IP telephony system out there,” Windham says. “We believe that Switchvox is the most popular open source PBX out there.”

Skype has had its share of bad news lately, with a malware attack following close on the heels of a massive outage. Current events raise questions about Skype’s technology that won’t — and shouldn’t — go away.

One is the perennial architecture question: proprietary (Skype) vs. open (SIP). Recently I asked SIP application company Counterpath’s CTO Jason Fischl to talk about it. Fischl was also the architect of TelTel’s SIP-based VoIP system.

“When you’re trying to design a system to scale there are two places you can have a problem: design of the protocol or in a bug in the implementation,” he explains.

And quite simply, in protocol design as in so many of life’s other arenas, numbers count.

“In the case of SIP we have protocol design by people who’ve been designing telecom protocols for many years.” People like Cisco and Nortel telecommunications engineers, who have generations of experience with the problems that can crop up in communications networks.

“In the case of Skype, they have a very small group,” he continues. “The advantage [for Skype] is that they can make it simple. But a lot fewer people are looking at it. It’s a monoculture. The same group of people are making all the decisions — and the decisions are made for tactical reasons rather than technical reasons.”

And then there’s implementation execution. Here, too, more is better.

“When you see the problems Skype had, you see the advantages of SIP. In the case of SIP, you’ve got hundreds — even thousands — of implementations. Lots of service providers implement SIP. Any problem they have isn’t going to affect the entire population — just their customers. Lots of different vendors implementing is a nice benefit.

“But the consequences of a flaw in the case of Skype — it’s a catastrophe,” adds Fischl. “There are no other implementations.”

Fischl suggests that Skype’s outage may have had more to do with the centralized aspect of Skype’s architecture than the peer-to-peer dimension. “One of the [problematic] things about their [Skype’s]architecture is that the authorization of users is done on a central server. That leaves open a vulnerability.”

SIP, by contrast, has a distributed authorization process. “It relies on an overlay network. You make a query into the overlay network and find out how to contact subscribers.”

Further, the IETF’s — Internet Engineering Task Force — peer-to-peer SIP working group is looking at an architecture that will do complete peer-to-peer SIP without a server at any point.

“One of the fundamental requirements is that you won’t need a central server when you login — only when you sign up. The consequence is that if servers went down you wouldn’t get new customers, but customers can still make calls.”

Fischl confesses to being puzzled that Skype hasn’t embraced SIP. “To being with, they’ve already got SIP gateways — why not go further down the road? I think if they took that approach — augment the network, let any SIP endpoint connect — they’d have a huge network of vendors building devices.

“Who knows?” Fischl adds, “Maybe they’re going down that road.”

Poor Skype. As if the outage a few weeks ago wasn’t enough, a Windows worm called Pykspa.d is catching a ride on Skype IM, according to this report in PC World.

Businesses and ITSPs have long-needed an inexpensive way to connect legacy analog devices to a VoIP network, and Linksys announcement of the SPA8000 — an eight-port FXS Analog Terminal Adaptor device — early this year had many eagerly anticipating its release.

Finally, that time is here. The Linksys SPA8000 is now available in the United States.

We’ve been testing a unit Linksys made avaialble to us for several months. Read our First Look at the Linksys SPA8000-G1 or if you have already bought a unit, try the new Linksys SPA8000 Device Configuration Wizard.