Phonebo.cx more information

We would like to thank the FreePBX Community, and Sangoma, for the warm welcome.

As a quick reminder, we’re taking over where PBX In a Flash left off - they are not going to support FreePBX 13 or higher, and are affectively dropping support of it and suggesting people move to Xivo or other commercial solutions. We didn’t like that when it was announced, so a group of us got together and went „We can do that!”. So that’s what we’re doing!

We have the skeleton of our website up now, on https://phonebo.cx (we were honoured to be given some AWS credit by an anonymous benefactor) which we will be updating over the upcoming weeks.

To start with, we are making an extremely basic fork of FreePBX, with extremely tiny changes as a proof of concept. Our fork will automatically track FreePBX, thanks to the intelligence of git, so there will not be a lot of time needing to be spent on managing it which is lucky, as we are all students, with not much spare time!

We urge you to read our website, and if you have any questions, please feel free to talk to us via Twitter (we are https://twitter.com/phonebocx) or here on the FreePBX forums, or the PIAF forums.

I would like to create a FAQ page on the website, so please ask questions so that we can answer them!

Thank you.

FreePBX developers have stated on this forum multiple times that FreePBX 13 is already available in a 100% open-source version straight from their repository. Do you dispute this and if so, what invalidates their claim?

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Thanks for the warm welcome on your site as well :wink:

It is not advantageous for open source contributors to battle in the open source market place for end users, contributors, customers or mindset. There are much larger opportunities in strengthening FreePBX to compete against the traditional PBX solutions of the world. In other words, there is no reason for us to fight over the same piece of pie, when there is an entire cake that no one is touching.

To get the biggest benefits out of open source development, you really need to have as many users as possible implementing, testing and developing on the same and current release packages. You will find that the development team, as well as the rest of Sangoma are very open to outside contributions and ideas, my contact information is all over the place feel free to PM me or give me a call to chat whenever about features or things you wish to see implemented in FreePBX, if it makes sense I can help lobby for your ideas.

By introducing a brand new distribution that incorporates a FreePBX release, we are not putting our best combined foot forward. If you have developer skills I believe you will find that actually contributing to the project you have hopes of forking is the best way to get your thoughts and design ideas implemented, not only as an afterthought in your own distribution, but at the core of the product.

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I agree with Preston,
By giving me a different build, you’re not giving me something that Sangona isn’t except for GPL which for me, as long as the Distro is free and they’re not able to start charging me for using it a year from now, I don’t care that it’s not all GPL, doesn’t affect me as a user.
I do agree that the Distro is a little spammy, with all of the installed modules that aren’t licensed (they just create clutter and take me an extra 25 minutes to un-install) but that’s the price of free, so I do it anyway.
I would like to see a method for installing basically the equivalent of the Distro on Amazon or Digital Ocean without a 100 step expert only page, that is the only thing I miss about PIAF but beyond that you’re not providing anything other than a different build with different bugs that I can’t use, because what happens when you guys stop supporting it, like PIAF? I’m forced to move back to the Sangoma Distro.
I would much rather see you guys contribute to the Distro, and if Sangoma doesn’t accept a lot of the changes you guys are suggesting then go build your own.

What I would really like to see is a new open source endpoint manager that makes it very easy to add your own phone types. By simply uploading a file that you create in excel or something. Not that I don’t like Commercial one or anything or don’t like support a company that will put work into it but free and open source is well… free, and who doesn’t like free? That’s why we’re all here right?

The reason open source endpoint managers are not flooding the market is because it is a full time job to maintain them. We have a developer dedicated to the commercial EPM. The open source EPM developer got burnt out on it. When you create something for fun and give it away for free the idea is when it becomes popular people who use it will help and submit patches, code, etc. After a while it becomes “not fun” and you move on to things that are not taxing or things that pay the bills. Iver the last few years there was a strong push to get people to maintain the OSS EPM but “nobody has time for that”. When we made some transitions with FreePBX 13 a developer who used the OSS EPM wanted to go to 13 decided to dump many hours into porting the OSS EPM into 13. I still believe he is submitting new code. He is making it work for his needs and contributing back. If everyone who wanted a model, widget or otherwise would make it work for them then give back the OSS EPM would be fantastic. The problem is many people want the results without any effort or investment.

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Oh I totally get this. Which is why I wish the OSS EPM was easier to build models for, I can fumble my way through certain code but quickly get outside my comfort zone. And OSS templates walk that line for me.

The one exception to what I said above might be if you could create a build of FreePBX that has a page in which I could change all of the Logos and brand it as my own, change the CSS color schemes and such. Set all of my default settings in advanced and sip and everywhere else, then had a way to install that onto multiple systems. That I think a lot of people would be interested in.
The problem is it would need to be able to accept updates without blowing out the customization.