Here’s a question we bet you haven’t heard all day: “If there’s a cloud for compute, for storage, for Java programmers, for those who love Ruby and any other variation under the sun, why shouldn’t there be a small business VoIP cloud to deliver telephony over the Internet?”

Stop and think about it. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

That’s from the GigaOM blog. And the blog says there might be a solution on the way. “Sure, there are services out there from Bandwidth.com, Twilio (News - Alert), Asterisk and many other companies,” Gigaom goes on to say, “but with the launch of Whistle, the 2600 Hertz Project wants to make building a VoIP cloud cheaper and easier than ever.”

Whistle, according to GigaOM, is software is designed to handle up to a billion calls per month – think that could handle your demands? – “on about six virtualized (or not) servers and can connect to run on or with Rackspace clouds, Amazon’s clouds or on a private cluster of machines.”

So what that means, GigaOM says, is that “Instead of paying a penny or so per minute to a VoIP company, businesses that want to add voice calling over the web to their social network, their app or their role-playing game just deploy this software and take care of it themselves.”

About a year ago TMC (News - Alert) had the news that according to Mission Bay Conference Center News Facts, GigaOM, a media company publishing for technology insiders and enthusiasts, announced its “market-disrupting research service,” GigaOM Pro, at the Structure 2010 Conference in San Francisco.

The GigaOM blogger notes approvingly that Darren Schreiber, co-founder and CEO of 2600 Hertz, “says the plan is to offer folks the source code for Whistle, but to support and sell services on top of it, in much the same that every other open source software company plans to make money.”