Voxeo announced at today’s OSCON (Open Source Convention) that the source code for its Tropo cloud telephony service will be made available to developers for free under open-source licenses. Consider this a significant development for cloud computing vendors and open source advocates.

Applications built on Tropo will be able to answer and place calls via traditional landline phones, mobile phones, corporate PBXs and newer IP-based solutions such as SIP and Skype. In addition to being open-source, the Tropo platform is built entirely on open standards including SIP, Java SIP Servlets, and the IETF's Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP).

And it gets better. In the next few weeks Voxeo Labs will release additional Tropo components that will allow developers to run their own Tropo applications in private clouds, elastic computing services, or their own servers in conjunction with Voxeo's free Prophecy platform.

"Ultimately our goal is to make Tropo the open, cross-vendor foundation for frameworks such as Adhearsion and others," stated Jason Goecke, VP of Innovation at Voxeo Labs. "We look forward to fostering an open-source community that will give developers greater choice, including the option to deploy their own cloud services."