Great. Thank you for that assurance. Of course nothing is static so even an existing system has to be updated and maintained. Otherwise you’ll find yourself running Trixbox 10 years later. I don’t ever want to be THAT guy.
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Would love to see the FreePBX Distro migrate to a Debian or Ubuntu LTS base even if it delays a new FreePBX Distro release significantly.
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Yep, there is strong support for a FreePBX Distro on Debian. Hopefully, it won’t delay the process too much…
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Well outside of the fact that we are three months away from Asterisk v21 and FreePBX will not be able to support it at this time. At this point the entire OSS part of FreePBX is suffering because the distro part is flapping in the wind. I haven’t been able to see a single valid thing, outside of requiring PHP 8.1, that has been done for FreePBX v17. All the work that was done in 2022 for moving app_macro calls to app_gosub were reverting back in January and that is where it has sat.
I mean, I can’t even get answers to development issues I’ve brought up. So I guess the mantra is now “Contributions welcome, we just won’t help in any way for you to contribute”
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Did I misunderstand?? FreePBX won’t run Asterisk 21? Don’t the Asterisk and FreePBX developers work for the same company? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Yikes!
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Yes, that is correct. This is something that has been in place before Sangoma acquired Digium as app_macro has really been deprecated since Asterisk 11 (there are pages dating back to 2012 on wiki.asterisk.org detailing this). Now comes 2018 where Sangoma acquires Digium a couple months before v16 is releases and even at that point the announcement for the removal of app_macro and chan_sip where already in place. Both of those where supposed to be removed as of Asterisk v19 but FreePBX is the reason it was pushed back to v21.
Now we are roughly 90 days away from Asterisk v21 being released and as of today neither app_macro or chan_sip exist in the master/main code branch of Asterisk. They will not exist in Asterisk v21 and since the majority of what is done in FreePBX dialplan is handled by Macro() calls, including the custom dialplan hooks that are allowed by users, it will break how FreePBX works.
To be very clear on this, the Digium/Asterisk team has done everything in their power to advise not just FreePBX but any other projects using Asterisk of these changes for the past 6+ years. The FreePBX project under Schmooze ignored the app_macro deprecation, the project under Sangoma (the Schmooze team) ignored it, when the Schmooze team left 4 years ago the new team that was handed the project also ignored it.
So where things go from here, who knows. I guess Sangoma is too busy trying to make that Star2Star purchase actually mean something and since Star2Star’s platform is based on FreeSWITCH, you know the Asterisk alternative, focusing on FreePBX or PBXAct just might not be in the future cards for Sangoma.
I mean, I’ve been trying since around April of 2022 to get some sort of idea of what the development plans for Asterisk v21 and FreePBX v17 were going to be so I could help out and I’ve just been met with the Simon & Garfunkel treatment (the Sound of Silence).
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As the Ferengi of the Star Trek series might say, “Where is the profit in that?” FreePBX and its open source version likely make little money for Sangoma. I suspect Asterisk will continue but I’m not optimistic that FreePBX distro or PBXAct will move forward. Look at all the layoffs and resignations from these teams.
Perhaps, someone enterprising like VitalPBX or a newcomer will release a more open-source GUI that actually continues to move forward with Asterisk. The other alternative will be that Asterisk 21 will still allow macros and chan_sip. That would be the path of least resistance but I seriously doubt the FreePBX team will have the manpower or budget to actually modernize their product to update badly deprecated subtending requirements.
If it comes down to nothing but community support for FreePBX, maybe its time to dust of the old open source Asterisk GUI and bring it up to speed with Asterisk and current security practices.
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This isn’t an alternative. They’ve been removed from the core code, they are not being put back in.
Which will leave FreePBX effectively dead at the end of support for Asterisk 20 unless FreePBX is updated.
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To provide dates[1] on the current LTS versions, Asterisk 18 goes EOL October 20th 2025, and Asterisk 20 goes EOL October 19th 2027.
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I am probably going to ultimately fondly remember voip along with Beta-MAX, and 1/4" audio tape as a good idea at the time.
Did ‘BIG $’ get round to replacing Cobol with AI yet, it’s been 9 months ?
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Now I see why the latest releases of Incredible PBX are called Incredible PBX 2027.
I don’t think VOIP will be a thing of the past, it will just go back to being proprietary to a few big companies with things like they were in the Avaya/Nortel/Cisco days. Businesses require phones. Despite the belief of Gen-X and Millennials, you can’t run a business on a smart phone or Teams.
My (ex) clients are telling me otherwise 
, they thank me for our years together, but still ‘move on’
Still have the old Legal and Medical clients for faxes and ‘compliance’ but even they are mostly dropping the ‘seats’.
Uhm, Voice Over IP isn’t going any where since IP based is where things have been moving to. I think you’re conflating the need for a company having their own PBX versus using a UCaaS platform for the exact same thing with extra features.
You miss my point, ‘voice’ is being used less and less as a primary contact with my clients r yours, The internet is prevalent and ubiquitous,
I imagine you are much like me, you now contact your banks, brokers, doctors, dentists, car dealerships, with the computer in your pocket, This is also true for my kids and grand-kids with them a phone call would signal an emergency.
providing a unified communication system is no longer cost effective for most of us, even though I have offered sms, voice to text, text to voice, synthetic IVR’s and god knows what else for quite a few years, I can no longer make a buck while competing with ‘almost free’, so I note and report my atrophying business, not with regret but pragmatically. Luckily my journey has provided me with tangential skills I hope will work moving on. Until then I will still take my extant $5-10 per month seats.
Well you said voip so I was basing my reply on that. I’m not sure what type of clients you have/had where this is the case but I’m still seeing plenty of usage from my clients.
I know we’ve had a similar convo like this in the past where you said they moved on to Teams or something else along that. Those are still voice services which is a lateral move. Just like how over the years people have dropped analog fax but laterally moved to digital fax. They didn’t completely get rid of fax they just changed how they did it.
When was faxing ever analog, always black dots or white dots, no ? . Fax is fax T30 is not as reliable as T38 but works better over flakey g711, especially if carried over SIP , HIPPA is what it is, understood or just plain dumb, but for compliance I still run a Debian 9 server using t38modem, hjylafax, email2fax and fax2email but it is still doing dozens, but no longer hundreds pages a day flawlessly. These old farts (include me in that group) will not change and still pay for my grandkid’s shoes, but we are literally a dying breed.
Uhm, you have always been able to FAX over a POTS line which was (is) a 100% analog. So, it’s been analog since it was invited until IP options where available. 30 years ago the only way to fax over digital was to use ISDN/PRI or T1’s.
T.30 has been in use since 2005 and was meant for analog and ISDN or other digital switched networks (aka TDM/copper). T.38 is the IP version that encapsulates the data stream to T.30. So you are saying that T.30 isn’t as reliable as T.38 which converts things to T.30? That’s interesting.
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