Hi FreePBX,
We really want this module but it seems not available with FreePBX15 version.
Is there a way that we can enable or maybe soon you will be releasing a compatible module for FreePBX15?
The fpbx project has no plans at the moment to backport it to 15.
Hi Igaetz,
Hopefully they will consider to backport it to FreePBX15. It would be great since a lot of us still using that version and really helpful.
AFAIK, FreePBX 16 has support for more modern PHP. And it is a normal thing that new features are only released to the latest stable version.
With that being said, FreePBX this module appears to be open source under GPL. You are more than welcome to backport this to v15 and submit a PR.
What are the EOL plans for 15? At this point, things like this are going to require work that shouldn’t be needed to backport to support even more EOL things (PHP, etc). We’re now hitting a 3.5 year lifespan on v15 and making things work for it will impact how future development can be done.
Specially since the project needs to jump to PHP8. I think it’s time this project started have real life spans for their releases and not someone randomly waking up one day and going “This version is EOL now”.
Historically, the FreePBX engineering team has supported only two major versions at any given time – the current version and the previous one.
However, I’m not sure if this is still the policy.
That is the current policy.
The project supports 15 and 16 at present. When 17 beta is released, 15 will go to security fixes only. Around the time that 17 goes to GA, 15 will go EOL.
I know but then again, when it comes to policy for this project I find my self asking…what are the rules? Because I haven’t seen a single, decent policy last long over the years. Remember “Update Tuesday”? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. That was something during the v14 era where every update was going to be released on Tuesdays to help people manage updating their systems and not having to check for them all the time.
Keep in mind that until that blog post was made FreePBX had four versions active, 13/14/15/16. We’re supposed to be seeing v17 this year (hopefully) and even that is still a 2 year gap between major versions. I guess I should look to see if v17 is even being made for PHP8 or not because if not, are we going to have to wait another 2 years before we get major update like that? Years after PHP7 has been EOL.
It’s very nice and good that this is a OSS module for FreePBX. The real shame here is that the “leading OSS PBX system” has to highlight how this is their first OSS module release in like years with everything else being 100% commercial.
Bottom line, there is absolutely no need for v15 to be continued after almost 4 years, a major release since then and a new one coming around the corner.
Don’t forget dynroute which is OSS and very cool. Released last year I think.
Naw, it’s like from 2020 or so. There are blog posts from 2020 by Lorne about this module.
Powerful Call Flow control using the Dynamic Routes Module | FreePBX - Let Freedom Ring
Time flies 
I am super curious because I don’t know but are there a lot of contributors to FreePBX that are outside of Sangoma?
No, that’s part of the overall problem.
Right, so I guess I understand why free modules are not a priority. Not sure what they could do different to foster contribution from the outside though.
Barriers to entry for FreePBX development are pretty low, other than knowing PHP. Setting up a dev environment and working in the FreePBX framework are well-documented on the wiki.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know who would want to work on backporting modules from 16 to 15. (the topic of this thread) If someone wants v16 modules, then upgrade.
What would drive someone to contribute a new module? Some functionality that doesn’t currently exist.
I think bug fixes and documentation are the best contributions that the open source community could make.
Yea, I guess this is a bit off topic at this point but I was just trying to figure out what the state of OSS contribution to the project is.
But my question in general was just related to occasionally seeing people commenting on how Sangoma should prioritize one thing over another and I just didn’t know who was contributing to the development of the platform any more.
Just trying to get my head around the state of the project, that’s all.
I think the key reason it doesn’t attract third party contributions is that FreePBX is, primarily a business tool. Although Asterisk probably also doesn’t get a lot of outside contributions, FreePBX is much more limited to business productivity use than Asterisk, and also it lacks the more technical aspects of some of the coding in Asterisk.
Fair. Although there are plenty of examples of businesses contributing upstream to tools that they benefit from. Netgate or TrueNAS might be examples of this. Netgate contributes to the upstream code base for FreeBSD and TrueNAS contributes a lot to the zfs project for example.
Granted, these contributions are for things that benefit them in the end but there are examples of OSS projects attracting major and continuing contributions from a business entity and not necessarily individuals for whom coding is a hobby.
Now that bitbucket is back up, you can go there and look at the merged pull requests to see who has contributed to FreePBX since the beginning of the year: https://git.freepbx.org/plugins/servlet/all-pull-requests/project/FREEPBX?state=merged
Looks mostly like Sangoma but I see a couple usernames on there that appear to be external.
1 Like
You would be surprised. I know of at least a half dozen that hang out on IRC. There are more active in Gerrit for Asterisk than FreePBX. Remember, the Asterisk devs dont take requests. Someone wants a feature, they need to submit that feature…with code.
A lot of things in Asterisk are community developers from features to bug fixes.