Sangoma acquires Schmooze

I wanted to make a few quick points. Seems most of the posts are help requests. No comments on the acquisition.

Using FreePBX or any Open Source project makes you part of a community.

I think Sangoma is going to be a great fit. They don’t have a PBX offering and this fills the portfolio out. They have been long time supporters of the project and understand the community. The access to capital will help grow all aspects of the project.

To all my friends at Schmooze, I could not be happier for your success.

So what does the community think?

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One word. “Fonality!” Recall what a “great fit” they promised to be? I do. Sorry, but at the outset, this sounds all too familiar. Sangoma’s inadvertently inherited an unfortunate legacy from one of FreePBX’s vibrant past morphings that is not of their making, but one they’ll have to live down and disprove nonetheless. I certainly hope they do!! Warm and fuzzy boilerplate press releases aren’t quite enough to reassure me. My $0.02.

Many differences on that front, most importantly the quality of the people. Chris Lyman, President of Fonality at the time was a complete lying, two faced, manipulative putz. Water seeks it’s own level and with few exceptions the people surrounding him were of equal stature.

As always time will tell, the same was said of Bandwidth and Schmooze, I think Tony has proven himself a good steward of the project so let’s not let the Fonality histrionics taint our perceptions and foster an atmosphere of distrust.

It’s a great thing to be a FreePBX reseller. Why don’t you come on down to ITExpo in Miami, free admittance and seminars on Schmooze and judge for yourself? It’s tons of fun to meet the team in person and the 1:1 time is invaluable.

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Another thing to note is that Fonality did a “fork” of the project. They were never stewards. They never controled the original source, and never once gave back anything to FreePBX itself (from their fork), aside from making it more popular and green. Comparing Schmooze or Sangoma to Fonality is like comparing Apples and Oranges.

Schmooze bought the trademark from Bandwidth a little over two years ago and has done nothing but given back to "FreePBX’ the open source project (which, again, no one, not even Schmooze or Sangoma “own” the source). People threw their arms up in rage two years ago when it was announced that Schmooze bought the trademark from Bandwidth with the same concerns that are being expressed now (“Schmooze is going to be just like Fontality” [Hint: we weren’t]). Now that Sangoma has bought Schmoozecom (ergo buying the trademark for FreePBX in tandem) we are back to the same comments made two years ago so I wanted to clear some things up:

Remember again that no one “owns” the source of FreePBX. Sure there are copyrights (as GPLv2 and v3 provide) but no one, no company can take the source code away from you (it’s against the law). It will always be on http://www.github.com/freepbx at least and if you don’t feel Sangoma is doing the “good fight” nothing is stoping you from maintaining your own “fork” of FreePBX and it’s not against the law to do so.

In comparison Fontality’s codebase for Trixbox was never released publicly but they called it “open source” from the standpoint that they “used” open source, even after demands from the community to release the source when the project was falling apart (and a leading member of their forums who fought for releasing Trixbox’s CE source was @SkykingOH). From Fontality’s point of view FreePBX was merely “forked” internally and then (from all assumptions) deleted internally when they gave up on it.

I’m all for people having skepticism or reservations, it’s what motivates us as human begins and it’s what drives us at Schmooze AND Sangoma to “prove” everyone wrong with our open source contributions! :slight_smile: But the continual “this is turning into Trixbox” is just getting… well tiring… because there’s no proof and there’s no way it could be the same as Trixbox or Fontality because Fontality was never a steward of the project and never gave back any source code to the project. When I step into the office tomorrow and submit code it will be the first proof that Sangoma contributes back to FreePBX, something Fontality can never attest to.

On a lighter note. I am now a Canadian employee! Huzzah!

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OK now that that’s done…

I’m not going to go too deep in to this because Andrew did ok on his own. Let me just say look at the Schmooze team. Tony assembled the “FreePBX Justice League”. All of us have been in the community a long time and have a good chunk of our lives in to this on payroll and off payroll. We are very passionate about FreePBX and want nothing but the best for it. We were all victims of past indiscretions and we are mindful of history as not to repeat it.

This is from the first OTTS in 2008. You see David from Sangoma, Jared from Digium and me at the time from Rhino. This is not a cut throat world it is an ecosystem. It is and has always been in everyone’s best interest to work together.

As @SkykingOH said come visit us in Miami for Asteriskworld at ITEXPO and look us in the eyes. No tack booth girls, real folks involved in the project.

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I’m not much in the Schmoozosphere - 2 or 3 systems under my belt - but I have been following Schmooze for quite some time. I really hope this is good for Schmooze and for those of us using FreePBX and PBXact. I’m cautiously optimistic. I have always liked Sangoma as a company, so hopefully this is a really good fit.

This is all certainly reassuring. I’ve never had any problems with Schmooze at all, and never felt the sleeze-like feeling I got with the whole Fonality/Trixbox era. So, my concern wasn’t so much a passing of any judgement on Schmooze, but more a voice of concern over the inherent degree (however great or small) of uncertainty that changes of ownership can sometimes lead to. I’ve been through several mergers and acquisitions, and an IPO, and you never can be 100% sure about anything. But, while I like the strength I see in your statements of commitment here, I always feel it’s a healthy practice that while looking up and ahead, to always occasionally turn and look down and behind just to be reminded of what you need to strive to avoid in the future. So, as I said initially, I want nothing more than to have my concerns proven to be unfounded! :slight_smile: BTW, exactly when is ITExpo? Sounds fun!

I’ve posted a blog link below reference the future of FreePBX, and as to your question, we are back in sunny Miami in January 27th - 30th, make plans to join us for Asterisk World and ITEXPO where we will be Platinum Sponsors. We expect to be sharing a lot of great new information about the continued development of FreePBX 13, and provide demonstrations of our new M3 Multi Machine Management Platform for managing multiple instances of FreePBX. Take a break from the winter weather, sign up here for a FREE VIP Pass

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James, If your going to be a Canadian employee you better learn to love hockey.

First lesson don’t call it ice hockey, its just hockey
Seocond lesson don’t let the guys at Sangoma turn you into a stinkin low life Leafs fan.

That is all
Go Jets Go

We do hockey already…

I actually prefer the minors…

Games are closer and cheaper and they still leave red on the ice.

My wife is a Washington(State) native so hockey tends to be a big deal for her too…

Ummmmm not to burst your bubble but…

It’s Arizona Coyotes now (I think the logo above went away about 10 yrs ago)

And the ECHL roadrunners folded in 2009

Sorry dude your a bad Canadian :wink:

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I live right next to the Anaheim Ducks and I go there quite often. Hockey is boring on TV but awesome in person so I prefer live games overall.

Always be “phoenix” for me. They switched to “Arizona” for both the cardinals and Coyotes when they shipped them to Glendale. They opened a sports complex and no doubt bribed some people to move the teams to the middle of nowhere. When we go see the Coyotes live (Rarely) we have to drive about 90 minutes 1 way. I can say I am not a big enough fan of any sport to drive 3 hours round trip. Usually take the wife for special occasions. Never go to the cardinals. Speaking of which the Super Bowl is in Glendale but all the pre-game activities are in town.

It has apparently been a few years since I went to a roadrunners game. Time flies I guess…

Andrew, are you going to the Teemu game?