This morning the group that owns blast from the past such as NetZero Juno dialup, Magic Jack etc BRC Holdings has entered in to an agreement to purchase Sangoma for $204m. We probably won’t know for months how much or little this will change things but holding companies have a certain reputation. What are your thoughts on this.
Edit per Chris comments: Note image was AI generated per the watermark and metadata attached from gemini ( I wonder if discourse has a plugin for this to read those signatures) and the deal is not closed (aI makes mistakes) but I see no reason it wouldn’t close. Usually by the time a M&A reaches an announce phase it is all paperwork the due diligence is typically done to a point it would take something really bad to kill it.
The holdings company scenario should prove interesting. I wasn’t aware of the NetZero and Juno history. I had as many NetZero accounts as I had spun up using the AoHell toolkit back in the day.
“As the primary developer and sponsor of the open source Asterisk and FreePBX projects, Sangoma is determined to drive innovation in communication technology continuously.”
Housekeeping…
Your graphic is problematic for (potentially) two three reasons:
The deal is not CLOSED yet, as your image states in capital red letters.
And assuming it is AI generated you didn’t mention the source of the image in accordance with our Code of Conduct section about attribution for content generated by Large Language Models.
EDIT TO ADD: the numbers on your image are nonsensical.
Wait… is that an AI generated image? After all the grief you’ve given us about AI
Not closed yet but…
I see the additional scale and investment as a real opportunity for our projects. After all, Asterisk and FreePBX are a big part of what makes this pairing so interesting.
@mwhite and @penguinpbx can you share a bit more on BRC and some of their successes? I believe citing some of BRCs history may provide some good insight for the community.
I admit, in recent happenings in my industry I don’t have the best feelings towards acquisitions, my organization was hit pretty hard by Broadcom acquiring VCenter. Which just made us move to another solution, that was open source.
Nothing wrong with responsible AI use for things like copy editing or meme generation. Having it write entire projects or take full control of things is not the same thing as a quick meme.
This is more of a general chat… if they wanted to pin something it would be better if @penguinpbx or @mwhite did a quick blurb with the official press release over this
I don’t think so – OP is continuing to post in this topic but clearly their AI image too much to fix it (and could potentially change the content at any time to something even more inaccurate/disturbing.)
Hmm it looks like they’ve held on to their other telecom-based ventures for a while, so one can hope they’re not in it to strip mine the place and run.
On another hand, FreePBX and Asterisk are Open Source.
A fork is possible.
There is no way to lock something which is open source. Or maybe I’m wrong.
I don’t know.
Agree they could be. However there are some modules like endpoint that are not. I’m sure plenty of people don’t use any commercial closed source modules, but there’s already projects out there that take FreePBX already and you can use it without the “bloat”. Also, there was another attempt (if not more) to “re do” FreePBX and that seems to have halted. It would take a lot of effort to get certainly a viable version of FreePBX honestly. Honestly, my opinion is the quality coming out on new versions is poor. Perhaps the injection of money will take it forward. It depends on who you talk to, to whether it feels like Sangoma gave enough love to FreePBX in last couple of years. There’s some real passionate people in the company for the frog, just not sure people at the top have the same opinion.
Well. In recent years, a new element has entered the picture: AI. Regardless of one’s opinion on AI, it’s an excellent tool for developing and debugging modules. The game has undeniably changed. Today, what was impossible a few years ago has become possible. So, let’s put this tool to good use.
Let’s take the example of the terminal manager. There is another open-source module that could be enhanced with AI and offer the same functionalities as the commercial module.
I think you’re overstating things there. What required a lot of knowledge and experience a few years ago now requires less, for sure.
But on that note, one of my concerns with someone trying more aggressively to monetize FreePBX is placing restrictions on module functionality. Sangoma is already doing this to some extent – not by restricting modules, but making choices that keep the ecosystem closed. For example, two factor authentication can’t be replicated in an open source module because rather than exposing the login process to publicly available hooks or event listeners, they just modified the framework to check for their own module.
their AI image too much to fix it (and could potentially change the content at any time to something even more inaccurate/disturbing.)