I am very pleased that Twilio’s OpenVBX launched today. This is a project that I had the great pleasure of working on last year for several months with the fine folks at Twilio. When I last touched it, I thought it was 99% ready to go and felt a little frustrated that it wasn’t launched sooner.

Now that I see what they’ve been working on in the meantime I understand. A great deal of refinement and documentation has made this product so much better than what it was. They even made a very Apple-esque intro video to describe what it is and why it is a win for businesses. I am installing it now on my server and will update with my impressions soon.

While not yet advertised anywhere, OpenVBX is based on CodeIgniter, a very popular PHP framework. Even if you are more familiar with other frameworks like CakePHP, Kohana, Silverlight, etc., you should find the code easy to understand.

Commenters on this news at HN have been oddly upset over Twilio’s reasonable per-minute charge, which is not new. “Why pay 3¢ a minute when you can roll your own PBX with Asterisk and pay 0.0000000000000001¢ per minute with some VOIP provider?” they ask. Fair enough. But when you go eat a burger for lunch today, ask yourself why you didn’t raise and slaughter your own beef, grind the meat, and fry your own patties? Why pay a farmer, butcher, grocer, and restauranteur to do what you could have done yourself?

By the way, when it the last time someone has successfully used the word “restauranteur” in a sentence?