We have seen various people talking about abandoning PBX In a Flast for FreePBX 13. This is not a good thing. We love PBX in a Flash and FreePBX and GPL.
Because of this, we are taking FreePBX 13 and removing all propritary code and making it 100% GPLv3 (or v2 if not ‘v2 or higher’).
Sadly, due to some of our developers being in the US (most of us are in India) we must remain anonymous, so we can not be taken to court by anyone!
This means we use Tor for all our communications. Some forums do not like that (dlsreports banned my account, and cannot post on flash forums to) so we have our first announcement here!
Welcome! We love forks, we’re an open source kinda group here. I’ve manually upgraded your account, so you can post links, so you can go through and edit your posts if you want.
If you want any help, feel free to join us in #freepbx-dev on Freenode, and we’ll help you out there.
Not to knock what you or anyone else is doing but this seems a tad spammy. Also FreePBX is already GPL. As I replied to the twitter above non-GPL components are available but by no means mandatory. You can run FreePBX today 100% GPL with no forking or special magic.
From my understanding of things on the other mentioned forums:
PBX in a Flash uses FreePBX but is no longer a thing. It was replaced by “Incredible PBX” which is just a branded version of FreePBX 12. To make a 13 version of this one would simply need to change logos.
If you would like to run Incredible PBX 13 GUI I am sure you can download some graphics and slap them on a clean 13 install.
Also from my understanding Ward has put all his horses behind XIVO and 3CX and generally lost interest in anything related to FreePBX. That said I don’t see much maintinance/updating in the future for anything related to FreePBX or IncrediblePBX. This is 100% speculation that will be misquoted later.
If you feel that you might be taken to court then you have no idea how the licensing works, or you actually intend to abuse the GPL in some way. Regardless, it inspires no faith in whatever you are doing.
Bill I wish that was the case. Prior to Sangoma acquiring us we have plenty of Patent issues that we had to deal with on open source FreePXB code and paid well into 6 figures to settle those cases for all FreePBX users some with lawsuits filled others before they got filled as it was cheaper to settle then fight it. Yes I am talking even open source code.
I am referring to Schmoozecom. Beyond what you can find on Google searches I am not entitled to give details and again this was Schmooze not Sangoma thought that was very clear in my comment when I said before Sangoma acquired us.
Without giving details, can you answer: Are users entitled to use FreePBX without concern for infringement of any patents applicable to the FreePBX software? That’s obviously the part that I think is most important to us.
Relevant to this thread, does that extend to forks of FreePBX?
Of course you are not. It’s as is without warranty. Now that is where things like PBXact come in. It warrants against those types of things but FreePBX nor Asterisk nor Linux warrant against that.
Tony, my issue is that your initial statement is confusing. You wrote that the patent issues were on “open source FreePBX code” and “for all FreePBX users”. It’s either for all FreePBX users or it’s not. Did you mean PBXact?
That would not mean FreePBX covers users for all patent violations as you asked above. Digium and others settle patent troll claims all the time on open source code but you dont see some big notice saying hey we paid blah for this patent troll so dont worry about him anymore. These things are all handled in full non disclosures and not allowed to give any details to anyone. Remember your use of GPL code is without warranty from the copyright holder.
I’m sorry you and the team have had to deal with that. Of course we are all better off having a known entity affiliated with FreePBX, as opposed to anonymous Github/Twitter accounts affiliated with this new fork project. For one reason, it implies no support, and two, no accountability.
We are an anonymous collective. As far as I know, only one of us (me, dev4) speaks fluent english. The others don’t. I’m the one that’s in the US, and I’m the one that wanted us to stay anonymous, and everyone agreed it was a good idea so we’ve worked hard to stay that way.
We’ve been lucky with an anonymous benefactor who has set up some AWS services for us. I’m hoping you’re following our posts here too - thank you, again, from all of us.
The patent discussion above is not the main reason why we want to stay anonymous,but it is A reason. The main reason is that we don’t want to get sued for anything, at all.
Schmooze has said they want all these indemnities to protect themselves. If we are anonymous, we have no need of indemnities!
This also means we can never take any money or donations for this project (except maybe bitcoin). This does not worry us. We all have jobs, and we all have spare time.
With the poor english of the original announcement, I apologize. I have asked that I be the one to make public announcements, unless it is something exciting or urgent. If you see a poorly written post from us, please remember that not all of us speak fluent english!