FreePBX Updated Terms of Use

Distro Discussion & Help
1

I am just in shock and awe. The TOU were just recently updated (October 16th 2024) here Policies | FreePBX - Let Freedom Ring. These arbitrary fines that have recently added and no notice provided to any of your users does not seem very opensource or community driven at all. What is going on here. Each day its something new being discovered.

  1. Violation of Terms and Liquidated Damages. Please report any violations of the TOU, by flagging the posting(s) for review, or by emailing to: [email protected]. Our failure to act with respect to a breach by you or others does not waive our right to act with respect to subsequent or similar breaches. You understand and agree that, because damages are often difficult to quantify, if it becomes necessary for Sangoma to pursue legal action to enforce the TOU, you will be liable to pay Sangoma the following amounts as liquidated damages, which you accept as reasonable estimates of Sangoma’s damages for the specified breaches of the TOU:

  2. If you post a message that

  3. Impersonates any person or entity

  4. Falsely states or otherwise misrepresents your affiliation with a person or entity

  5. That includes personal or identifying information about another person without that person’s explicit consent, you agree to pay Sangoma one thousand dollars ($1,000) for each such message. This provision does not apply to messages that are lawful non-deceptive parodies of public figures.

  6. If Sangoma establishes limits on the frequency with which you may access the Service, or terminates your access to or use of the Service, you agree to pay Sangoma one hundred dollars ($100) for each message posted in excess of such limits or for each day on which you access freepbx.org in excess of such limits, whichever is higher.

  7. If you send unsolicited email advertisements to freepbx.org or Sangoma email addresses or through Sangoma computer systems, you agree to pay Sangoma twenty five dollars ($25) for each such email.

  8. If you post Content in violation of the TOU, other than as described above, you agree to pay FreePBX.org one hundred dollars ($100) for each Item of Content posted. In its sole discretion, Sangoma may elect to issue a warning before assessing damages.

  9. If you are a Posting Agent that uses the Service in violation of the TOU, in addition to any liquidated damages under clause (d), you agree to pay Sangoma one hundred dollars ($100) for each and every Item of Content posted in violation of the TOU. A Posting Agent will also be deemed an agent of the party engaging the Posting Agent to access the Service (the “Principal”), and the Principal (by engaging the Posting Agent in violation of the TOU) agrees to pay Sangoma an additional one hundred dollars ($100) for each Item of Content posted by the Posting Agent on behalf of the principal in violation of the TOU.

  10. If you aggregate, display, copy, duplicate, reproduce, or otherwise exploit for any purpose any Content (except for your own Content) in violation of the TOU without Sangoma’s express written permission, you agree to pay Sangoma three thousand dollars ($3,000) for each day on which you engage in such conduct. Otherwise, you agree to pay Sangoma’s actual damages, to the extent such actual damages can be reasonably calculated. Notwithstanding any other provision of the TOU, Sangoma retains the right to seek the remedy of specific performance of any term contained in the TOU, or a preliminary or permanent injunction against the breach of any such term or in aid of the exercise of any power granted in the TOU, or any combination thereof.

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Line item 12, are they saying that all the spam they receive, the spammer now owes them $25? Good luck enforcing that. I’m not pro spam but realistically, how will you collect?

James posted this to the reddit as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/freepbx/comments/1grflvv/you_may_want_to_delete_or_not_use_your_freepbx/

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3

:person_shrugging: no clue and I do not want to be fined for saying the wrong thing here.

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4

OK so now I have to call this out because I’m trying to be fair to both sides of this. These things being highlighted are not new, they did not get added as of Oct 16th 2024.

Check this out from Sept 21 2018 the date is very important because you were the COO then and the Schmooze team was the development team and in charge of the community. The TL;DR of that is:

  1. If you post a message that
  2. Impersonates any person or entity
  3. Falsely states or otherwise misrepresents your affiliation with a person or entity
  4. That includes personal or identifying information aboutanother person without that person’s explicit consent, you agree to pay FreePBX.org one thousand dollars ($1,000) for each such message. This provision does not apply to messages that are lawful non-deceptive parodies of public figures.
  5. If FreePBX.org establishes limits on the frequency with which you may access the Service, or terminates your access to or use of the Service, you agree to pay FreePBX.org one hundred dollars ($100) for each message posted in excess of such limits or for each day on which you access FreePBX.org in excess of such limits, whichever is higher.
  6. If you send unsolicited email advertisements to FreePBX.org email addresses or through FreePBX.org computer systems, you agree to pay FreePBX.org twenty five dollars ($25) for each such email.
  7. If you post Content in violation of the TOU, other than as described above, you agree to pay FreePBX.org one hundred dollars ($100) for each Item of Content posted. In its sole discretion, FreePBX.org may elect to issue a warning before assessing damages.
  8. If you are a Posting Agent that uses the Service in violation of the TOU, in addition to any liquidated damages under clause (d), you agree to pay FreePBX.org one hundred dollars ($100) for each and every Item of Conent posted in violation of the TOU. A Posting Agent will also be deemed an agent of the party engaging the Posting Agent to access the Service (the
    “Principal”), and the Principal (by engaging the Posting Agent in violation of the TOU) agrees to pay FreePBX.org an additional one hundred dollars ($100) for each Item of Conent posted by the Posting Agent on behalf of the principal in violation of the TOU.
  9. If you aggregate, display, copy, duplicate, reproduce, or otherwise exploit for any purpose any Content (except for your own Content) in violation of the TOU without FreePBX.org’s express written permission, you agree to pay FreePBX.org three thousand dollars ($3,000) for each day on which you engage in such conduct. Otherwise, you agree to pay FreePBX.org’s actual damages, to the extent such actual damages can be reasonably calculated. Notwithstanding any other provision of the TOU, FreePBX.org retains the right to seek the remedy of specific performance of any term contained in the TOU, or a preliminary or permanent injunction against the breach of any such term or in aid of the exercise of any power granted in the TOU, or any combination thereof.

I can find these policies going back to 2015. You and James were with Sangoma at the time and as I said, you were the COO. So either this is feigned shock and awe, you forgot or were unaware it existed during your time as COO.

Both sides slinging mud means no one gets out of this clean. There are valid concerns about the project that need to be addressed, let’s not lose sight of those with all the mud flying around.

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5

I pulled an archive earlier today when this was brought to my attention from Sept of this year and it did not show this. I did not go back further in time. If these existed back then, I stand corrected and I will take the blame and embarrassed that this would have made it past me and own up to that. I am man enough to own up to my mistakes.

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6

Awesome. Like I said I’m just trying to be fair to both sides because fighting FUD with FUD, like some here have admitted they are willing to do, solves nothing. It, in fact, can make it all worse.

Look Ma! I’m being all diplomatic and stuff.

7

So it appears that they shuffled around all the TOU numbering and sections, When this was brought to my attention, I looked at the archive from Sept 2024 and did not see it. If you look at the Sept 2024 archive compared to the current one they moved things around and renumbered things. I scrolled down to Section 6 that is shown in the current TOU and compared to Sept 2024 and it did not have that language. I should have gone through the whole thing more in depth. if you scroll all the way down toward the bottom you will see it was there.

We all make mistake and I have a lot of people sending me lots of information and I thought I vetted this well before posting it. I messed up.

What’s even more embarrassing is that this existed under my watch. It was never enforced while I was with FreePBX and given the current climate I would hope Sangoma would remove reference to all of that so users do not have to fear that they will be fined for speaking out.

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8

Honestly, I forgot it was even there until being told today.

9

So this is really bothering me on why I was not aware this got added. I spent the last 45 mins on wayback machine tracking the FreePBX websites over the years from different sponsors and platform changes. The first reference of this I can find is all the way back in Oct 2007. Terms Of Use | FreePBX

Everyone from Bandwidth, Schmooze, and finally Sangoma never even caught this. I have no clue when it got added but it predates me and Schmooze acquiring the trademark and website. I just can not believe it was never addressed and I have no memory of ever seeing it or anyone bringing it up to me. Shows how nobody pays attention to clicking to agree to blanket TOS or TOU of things.

This needs to be addressed by Sangoma and corrected now that it’s been made a thing.

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10

This is likely a remnant from the issues that were going on with Trixbox and the FreePBX project during that 2007-2008 period. Ironically, Trixbox/Fonality/NetFortis is now Sangoma… if you want a fun read, hit up some of those old threads from that era… FreeSwitch Released: Can FreePBX Be Far Behind?. The ultimate irony is the last post in that thread… seems to be a voice of reason.

Screenshot 2024-11-15 at 12.23.16 PM
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@penguinpbx @mwhite I’m usually pretty good at finding this kind of stuff in ToS… thanks to my ADHD superpowers, I missed it during the times I was with the project as well. Maybe a good time for you guys to clean up that ToS. I would maybe suggest an update to the Code of Conduct as well, it seems to be just a clone of the Discourse version, probably some stuff that can make it a little clearer, and relatable to open source software and the FreePBX Project.

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Thank you for the feedback. The FreePBX Community Forum FAQ and Code of Conduct were most recently modified together on 2024-09-11T06:00:00Z with site-specific updates to the flagging and stealing sections, amongst others.

13

Please understand that OP changed the title of their post - yes, the forum settings currently allow this at sufficient trust levels - however, the history is preserved, and included (below) is a screen shot of what happens when you click the pencil icon :pencil2: in the upper-right corner and flip back to the first revision.

To clarify for new users who might be confused by the title: OP is not currently officially affiliated with Sangoma or the FreePBX project, although both versions of the OP’s post title could be seen by reasonable visitors as confusing because of the way that “FreePBX” is used at the beginning – clearly, the post is not the FreePBX TOS itself, but in fact, criticism of the TOS, so, one better title might be “My Concerns with this Website’s TOS”.

And here’s the change:

tony-title-change
tony-title-change854Ă—269 33.2 KB

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14

OK I’m going to split the hair on this. Did Sangoma update the FreePBX Terms of Service on Oct. 16th 2024? Yes or no? Because all indications by Sangoma say the answer is yes. The ToS says is was updated 30 days ago. The title “FreePBX Updated Terms of Service” is factually 100% correct. FreePBX has indeed seen an update to it’s ToS.

The confusion is what changes were actually made. What the OP thought were changes to the ToS actually weren’t and I pointed that out immediately. That said, I can’t tell you what was actually changed without grabbing an archived version of the ToS from before Oct 16th 2024 and comparing. Sangoma did not notify anyone that the ToS was going to change. The new updates in the ToS are a mystery unless we do the extra leg work to figure out what changes we have to adhere and agree to. Changes to a ToS like this should be communicated because as users of this forum, we could end up breaking rules that change and we no had clue about it.

15

These TOU are not just about the website. Go read the whole thing. This extends to more than just the websites.

16

The original poster, not Sangoma, changed the title. The change by Sangoma is in moving it to the Site Feedback category.

17

Opps. My mistake.

18

Yes I made the change a few days ago. I did not mean to remove the word Updated. I just wanted to remove the part about important change since without going through the whole doc I have no clue what all changed. And I don’t have enough desire to comb through and figure out what changed at this time. I have fixed the title to add Updated back.

19

So now that you have acknowledged this posting will Sangoma be fixing this obvious oversight on trying to fine people or is this remaining in place?

20

95% of that is unenforceable, at least in my country, because to threaten monetary penalties, can only be incorporated by two party signed written agreement, or, by absolute shrinkwraping (think microsoft products etc, but that only applies to that one bit of software, not others), and certainly not forums or email.

Other parts of that document is comical, I really like the part about being “fined” for continuing to post after being banned :stuck_out_tongue: I really don’t know where to start with the rest of it, OK so its been established the base was written nearly 20 years ago, obviously even then not by a real lawyer - from any country.

The fact ISO and USB image remains also shows it had no love, despite adding the bash script thingy which AFAIK never existed previously, which I also find strange in so far that you can not modify it, so it sangoma release it and it has a rm -rf / in it you can not remove it, really? You are prohibiting someone to modify it to work on VPS? really? (OK Why youd run any pbx in a VPS is beyond me, but… people will do silly things) So long as they contribute it back to you, to make it available to others… you know… open source right thing to do…

I agree it has standing that if you take that script and use it for another project, but then, sangoma has to show its not “common code” to which 99% of bash instructions - are. They will have a time of it proving in a court that it is unreasonable to expect some proficient with sh/bash scripting to not think of using similar or same instructions, possible, but will be very costly for sangoma to prove because the burdon will be high as its not actual running-program code

I think sangoma need to pull that tripe entirely and have it written by a real lawyer, not some early to mid 2000’s likely copied from other websites anyway that was probably written back in the 90s, thats when the 25 dollar per spam message was fun thing, a funnier thing was it was unenforceable then, as it is now, and it really never deterred any of the vermin anyway.

However, I’ll add it would be awesome to see that appear every year, on April the 1st - even if for just 24 hours :smiley: