I want to understand the propriety of the various FreePBX modules

Distro Discussion & Help
1

I want to understand the propriety of the various FreePBX modules

There are the legacy ones that are unencombered and others that are not so much,

From the website http://www.freepbx.org/ it states quite boldy :-

FreePBX is an easy to use GUI (graphical user interface) that controls and manages Asterisk, the world’s most popular open source telephony engine software. FreePBX has been developed and hardened by thousands of volunteers over tens of thousands man hours. FreePBX has been downloaded over 5,000,000 times and estimates over 500,000 active phone systems. If you don’t know about FreePBX, you are probably paying too much for your phone system.

And If I download it from scratch it is exactly that, truly “open source” just like Asterisk.

I have been told that this distribution is a FreePBX distribution so I assumed that it would be also “open source” but I find in:-

http://www.freepbx.org/copyright-trademark-and-intellectual-property-policy

specifically

however, some accompanying bundled software may be released under other licenses. Please see the source code for the exact licensing.

There are modules that are installed that are not quite open and require Zend , while I don’t have a problem with that directly as everyone needs to make a buck, that encumberance makes restoring or migrating one system to other hardware a problem as yet un-acknowledged.

http://www.freepbx.org/trac/ticket/6037

Quoting the above need to examine the source code for the other licenses, for example the sysadmin module, is a little difficult as it is encrypted, a bit of a Catch-22.

Can any authority please clarify what are the licenses that we accept by default when installing this distibution and how the licensing of the free but proprietary modules can be migrated?

Thank you

dicko

2

You can use the module_admin utility to get this info, I simply copied from the GUI:

No obfuscation is intended, modules with a commercial license will only be displayed if you click the commercial button in module_admin.

Further, the bare metal install_amp script does not install sysadmin or any commercial modules.

3

Thank you for explaining Scott, We were told specifically that we could get it by reading the source code, I guess that is an errata that needs correcting.

So I am to understand that the FreePBX distro actually includes commercially licensed and non open source modules from Shmooze, yet the distro has nothing to do with them as I have been told so many times :wink: Let me wrap my head around that for awhile as I have been accused of confusing folks on this subject several times I guess I am maybe a little bit right though after all, maybe “Schmoozecentric distro” would be acceptable?

How about migrating the free and/or purchased licences between boxes using the backup/restore module? Should I just delete those extra blobs before attempting that venture?

4

I don’t know the in’s out’s of Zend. But a license migration would be good think.

It’s not as hard as you are making it.

Bandwidth bought FreePBX name from trademark holders 5 years ago and hired Philippe. That is there sponsorship (I am sure they do other things I am not privy to).

Schmooze has all their programmers work a certain percentage of their time on Open Source, the core FreePBX stuff. It’s symbiotic.

Schmooze is one of the sponsors of the Distro. I will let Tony disclose the others.

More complicated Schmooze runs the app store (kinda like apple) and gives away some modules to get people to look at the paid stuff.

Does this make sense? As all parties personally known to me I can vouch that no evil exists.

5

All commercial modules carry this disclaimer:

Here is the link to the legal eagle stuff.

http://literature.schmoozecom.com/EUA/FreePBXCommercialModule-EndUserAgreement.pdf

6

The only comment I will make is the source of the commercial module does disclose the license as its inside the module.xml that is included with the module hence it is in the source. It is also displayed in the module admin under each module if you click on description which is where Scott got that blurb from.

The FreePBX Distro is the official Distro of the FreePBX project as stated over and over and over It is worked on by the same core Development team of FreePBX but mainly done by Schmooze Employees that does not make it a Schmooze Distro as the official name of the product is FreePBX Distro. The FreePBX project is sponsors by bandwidth.com and schmozecom.com and has been for years and years.

As seen here http://www.freepbx.org/freepbx-distro

Hope this clears it up for the 3rd or 4th time now.

7

quote from the legalese:-

All Commercial software modules that are purchased are licensed for a single install/machine.
We allow you to reset the hardware lock to move the license to a new machine twice from the
user portal.

God help you if you use a true HA setup then (most of mine are, corosync, drbd/iscsi thingies, they are not covered by that verbiage) if you have a hot-spare setup, what then ? two cyles is all one is allowed? and you then need to manually reconfigure the system on both swaps after that you are SOOL?.

sysadmin surely cannot be considered purchased yet suffers from a similar encumberance, try migrating it please, it doesn’t work for me.

8

Sysadmin migrates just fine as it has no license check requirement. It will not break anything.

Customers who need dual license registration buy 2 license. we have customers do this in HA all the time and is common on license software from Digiums licensed modules such as Fax or G729, LumenVox, iSymphony, FOP2. All require the same thing.

Hope this clears it up

9

Correct, I just went through this with Nicolas at Astronic on an warm standby machine (ala Moshe pseudo HA).