If you are one of the over 2500 testers (or production sites) then you’ve probably gotten that upgrade email about RC3. So what’s with the feature creep and why hasn’t 2.5 gone final yet? For those who just want to know about the training discount, it’s here at the end.
We released RC1 3 weeks ago expecting to have already gone final by now, given the unprecedented stability and super low bug count we were seeing. Going RC typically means final feature freeze as well, so what’s up?
Well, there just has not been enough cash flowing in and the family is a little upset that we have been ignoring them. So pressing this button will go a long way to bribe us into releasing:
Seriously though, great projects like ours become very infectious during development periods and all the new additions in 2.5 were just "fuel on the fire." We started the release with a few new developers to the project and about the time we chose to go release candidate, so came yet more enthusiastic developers with new features at various stages.
Running a project like this during such times presents its challenges to the leader (me). I need to balance between schedule, stability and still encourage new blood to keep motivated and contributing. This second waive presented just that. The hard core program manager tact would be to remain in feature freeze and get the current release out. But that is not very encouraging to the volunteer developers who would like to see their contributions recognized. So this time around I chose to allow the enthusiasm to spread while very carefully controlling what went in and assuring its quality. After all, when you see RC2 and RC3 in the release versions, you have a high expectation that we have earned and intend to keep.
However, at one point we need to drive toward closure and we are doing such with RC3. Since the stability has continued to remain extremely high with bug counts still near 0, and most bugs reported being existing bugs in the 2.4 and previous versions just now being reported, we expect that 2.5 should be final within 1-2 weeks.
Open Telephony Training Seminar Discount
So what’s new in the release and how do you get more information? If you want to be the first to get the detailed rundown, your best route is to sign up for our next Open Telephony Training Seminar to be held at Digium’s headquarters on October 7-10th, 2008. In order to encourage our readership to signup, we’re offering a FreePBX 2.5.0 discount special of just $1995 (that’s a $500 savings, just type LETSGOFINAL in the coupon code). The special is good “while supplies last” or until we release 2.5. (And since we don’t know exactly when that is, we’ll just say Fri, September 19th but we reserve the right to change that depending on how the release goes!)
If you can’t make it to our training but will be at Astricon this year, come visit. I’ll be speaking Wednesday morning at 9:45AM, come say hi!
For now, have fun with the new release, and don’t forget that donate button above will help get us motivated to go final!
Philippe - On behalf of the team