For immediate release:
ATLANTA, GA (1 April 2016)--Alex J. Balashov, a self-styled
businessman based in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, has a plan to "Make
Kamailio Great Again".
"Evariste Systems is huge. My name is on the building," said
Balashov of his iconic VoIP consulting brand.
"And you know what, I have been very successful. Everybody loves me."
Balashov has capitalised on a contentious election cycle marked by
deep political polarisation, growing income inequality and geopolitical
challenges such as global terrorism. And his sharp message of alarm
about the declining influence of the Kamailio SIP server project has
resonated with increasing numbers in the CxO suite, vaulting him to
the lead in the race for the IETF SIP Working Group nomination,
according to recent polls of primary voters.
He has been quick to tout his competitive credentials in a tough
global open-source ecosystem. At a recent colloqium on unified
communications, he asked:
"When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let's say, OpenSIPS
in Git commits? They kill us. I beat OpenSIPS all the time. All the
time."
As Balashov sees it, a major cause of the beleaguered Kamailio
project's woes lies in its liberal patch acceptance policy and
lax scrutiny of third-party contributions:
"When GitHub sends its people, they're not sending their best.
They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending
people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those
problems. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're
rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
He has proposed a controversial solution that has drawn ire from
liberal ranks in the open-source community, but has also attracted
applause and standing ovations at his speaking engagements:
"We have to have a firewall around the Kamailio source code. We
have to have an access control list. And in that firewall, we're
going to have a big fat door where commits and pull requests can
come into the master branch, but they have to come in legally.
The firewall will go up, and GitHub will start behaving."
Balashov's firewall proposal has been met with scorn from critics who
deride it as impractical and quixotic. In particular, commentators
have raised questions about funding and resources as well as GitHub's
willingness to entertain a boundary around a project in its vicinity.
Balashov isn't concerned, however:
"I will build a great firewall--and nobody builds firewalls better
than me, believe me--and I'll build them very inexpensively. I will
build a great, great stateful packet inspection wall on our border
with GitHub, and I will make GitHub pay for that wall. Mark my words."
He has also been rebuked by rival IETF leadership candidates for his
often acerbic Twitter remarks directed at Lennart Poettering and the
developers of "firewalld". As he sees it, however, the network effects
of social media are a strength: "My Twitter has become so powerful
that I can actually make my enemies tell the truth." He scoffed at
the suggestion that his characterisations of industry actors behind
the RedHat-led "systemd" movement are misleading:
"RedHat was the worst Steward of Linux in the history of the kernel.
There has never been a Steward so bad as RedHat. The source code
blew up around us. We lost everything, including all synergies.
There wasn't one good thing that came out of that administration or
them being Stewards of Linux."
Balashov's idiosyncratic campaign is not standing still. He has proven
to be a capable populist, adapting rapidly to an evolving sense of the
kinds of pronouncements that activate his swelling crowds of devotees.
Along the way, he has deftly deflected calls to subject his policy
proposals to expert review.
"I know what I'm doing, and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to
a lot of people, and at the appropriate time I'll tell you who
the people are. But I speak to a lot of people, but my primary
consultant is myself, and I have a good instinct for this stuff."
At a recent gathering of SIP stack interoperability specialists,
Balashov the latest pillar of his platform to "Make Kamailio Great
Again", in view of growing security vulnerabilities in the latest
Kamailio modules:
"Alex J. Balashov is calling for a total and complete shutdown of
commits entering the master branch from the territory of the European
Union until our project's representatives can figure out what's going
on. According to Netcraft, among others, there are a lot of buffer
overflows in Kamailio by large segments of the EU population."
