Commercial modules don't work on non-RH or non-cent-os platforms

I am disappointed to discover that freepbx commercial modules cannot be installed on non-RH or non-centOS installations. I have spent about 4 months setting up a very stable asterix-freepbx system on wonderful debian and was just about to install the fax Pro and other commercial modules - but discovered that none of these will work on a debian install.

May I please ask that you make this clear on your download sites. Freedom doesn’t really ring true here

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The download page for commercial modules has the following in bold.

The following modules are not Open Source GPL and are only designed to work with the FreePBX Distro.

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Several places in fact:

Freedom to choose. That is our full tagline. Out of 133 modules for FreePBX there are over 90 that are fully open source and free. Roughly 67% of FreePBX doesn’t require CentOS or Red Hat. Does that really seem as though freedom isn’t ringing true here?

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As stated by others we do try to make it clear as possible on our marketing sites, and in the wiki, on what OS our modules are supported, if you have any suggestions as to places we can put it to help bring it to others attention I’ll be happy to consider adding more notices. (At one point I actually made our web developers use a tag in the portal about which OS we support.)

Now let me address why we only support Centos/RH/EL/SL/SHMZ OS. Commercial modules are just as their name implies, a commercially supported application… that means that we provide support and a guarantee that the applications will work for their intended purpose. In your post you state that you spent four months setting up a stable debian platform, that in itself outlines why we chose to standardize on one OS. (not starting a my OS is better than your OS flame battle here.) Standardization allows us to develop applications that will work with the majority of the marketplace, and not spend four months recreating the wheel every-time we add functionality or update an application. It allows the development team to focus on the core FreePBX platform and adding features, without having to duplicate efforts in building installation packages for every OS.

As the Sales and Marketing guy at FreePBX, I think it would be great to be able to sell commercial modules on any variant of OS, or on every type of hardware out there, it would obviously open up the potential for more revenue, however the current return on investment of development time, and some limitations on what hardware ZEND will work on makes that a more expensive proposition than its currently worth. Our development team does provide installation instructions for FreePBX on other OS’s and in the future sure we would like to provide support for anything with a command line, however it just isn’t a feasible proposition at this point, I hope this helps you understand our current position, it’s not that we dislike Debian, it’s more an issue of resources and judiciously using development talent and time we have to continue to push the envelope with FreePBX, without getting bogged down with OS specific issues.