Previously, the FreePBX project had announced that our next incarnation of the FreePBX Distro would be based on Rocky Linux. The recent announcements from Redhat now throw into question what the future of Rocky (and similar EL clones) will be like. Possibly it will remain as business as usual, but we won’t know for sure until some time passes, and who knows what future Redhat shoes have yet to be dropped.
There have been a few forum threads discussing the Redhat news and what it means to the FreePBX project. As of right now today, we have no firm plans, we are (once again) taking this opportunity to completely reevaluate the OS landscape, with an eye to starting completely from scratch if necessary.
Included in our current list of evaluation options is Debian, a repeatedly stated favorite of many in the community. Moving away from the EL environment poses real challenges to the project, not the least of which would be the sunk cost associated with the build environments we’ve already developed. It also means yet more delay in releasing an updated version of FreePBX.
We’ll have a formal announcement in the coming weeks announcing our plans.