Well it is a commercial module but it’s “free as in beer” as they say. Still not much use on installs that can’t run commercial modules, or those who prefer “free as in speech”
Free for 1 user and 1 year. Wow the joke! 
You have to just add more ‘licenses’, for $0, and then after a year, do it again. It’s very silly, but it works.
$0 per year? Hmm, I thought it was only for one year and then you had to pay. That’s absurd. I’m thinking specifically of the PMS module, which is available for free and limited to 5 rooms. This licensing model could apply to the MFA module.
Although I think this module should be free and unlimited. If the FreePBX team is focused on its security to prevent their distribution from being hacked out of the box, it’s a component that should be free to ensure the basic FreePBX is secure.
Well I think that they should add support for passkeys, but that’s for a different thread.
there’s a reason they have done it this way, so they can at a moments notice - like under new ownership, reapply the charges, it would take little effort for a competent developer to make a lifetime unrestricted 0$ module, but they choose not to, the bigger question there is, why.
correct, we have hundreds of installs from 3 person shop to several thousands in mining, aged care and hospitality, we dont use any commercial modules, no need for the bloat, and never found endpoint a time saver since its not a zero interaction process anyway. not to mention EPM is so outdated it’d be useless for us with alcatel handsets, and to lesser extend some cisco stuff - but we dont deal with those price gouging sods any more 
@Crosstalk just posted a video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZd728n7iqE Doesn’t look good to me when a company is losing money and gets bought by an investment firm. Hopefully they will put development into it instead of trying to bleed every dollar out of it. We’ve had way more issues with Voip Innovations since they were acquired by Sangoma.
I have what perhaps is a question based on my relative ignorance. When I first implemented FreePBX for my company, I chose an on-prem deployment of Incredible PBX. Nowadays I have us on TheWebMachine’s AWS AMI running on an EC2 instance.
Anyhoo, am I mistaken in that Incredible PBX based on a fork of the FreePBX OSS project, they have their own mirror, and the associated FreePBX modules are exclusively the GPL/APGL ones when it comes to the Sangoma?
My relative ignorance comes from the different layers that make up “the system.” Figure the engine is Asterisk, FreePBX is the framework layer that sits on top of that, and then there are FreePBX modules that plug into FreePBX.
The reason I’m asking the question is let’s say that one day Sangoma goes poof. Would someone like Incredible PBX be relatively unaffected? If they are based on a fork of FreePBX and have their own resources underneath that? Just trying to hedge bets and have contingencies. Even if nothing dire should occur, everyone needs Plan B, C, etc.
And CrossTalks reasoning and revenue breakdown is completely wrong. It’s mathematically impossible. It’s flawed maths and reasoning.
Heres the business wire article announcing it for anyone interested
You are. It is not a fork. Their mirror is the ClearlyIP mirror. At the end of the day, you just have FreePBX with some branding and extra addons that most people wouldn’t use anyways like weather and news. Oh and of course, It’s Lenny because that’s always important.
Thanks for the reply. So really when it comes down to it, the base FreePBX framework itself is open source. Anyone can fork that off at some point if they so choose. But when it comes to the FreePBX modules, that extends most of the basic functionality, that’s where it’s more of a walled garden that’s closed source, correct?
No. Every module you see on FreePBX Github is open source. They are licensed under various version of the GPL/AGPL. Commercial modules are closed-source.
If you install FreePBX without the Sangoma packages or installing any commercial modules, you’ve basically avoiding any close-source stuff being installed and you’re left with the OSS version of FreePBX.
So there’s like 90+ modules that are completely open source for FreePBX and those are all that you need to make it run and function.
The first thing I did was to check if BRC was a Private Equity firm. Using a product from a vendor which gets acquired by PE is an immediate call to migrate away - because PE works to strip out any assets as quickly as possible. Support sucks. Investment in quality and features sucks. It’s a race to escape before the product sucks and prices go ballistic. Run. Far away. Fast.
Anyway, apparently BRC is not PE. But they are still going to want to get their ROI on their $204MM. This is a situation to watch carefully.
Please provide the reasons as to why this should be watched carefully?
I would do everything I can not to be bought by an US-company as a Canadian company. This is at the time being politically incorrect and allows presure from foreign, aggressiv not specifically mentioned countries to a local company. Be aware of agreement for data tranfer which companies in a here not mentioned country have to sign or otherwise lose their licences. Therefore maybe in future we can anyway change backward from port 5160 to port 5060 when TLS-keys need to be published contractually.
Can you explain this better? Port assignments have nothing to do with any of this. You can choose which ports to use on your own, including which port is TLS and which one isn’t. And no one has ever had to publish TLS keys because of a contract. That is a security risk.
In case you take some look into the published Snowden books, you might possibly come to the solution that some cryptographic efforts sometimes become pointless. It is told there that major competitors within the telefonie industry are forced to include backdoors into there chips or software. However, I can’t verify such published information, but it’s in my nature and part of my job to be suspicious. An yes. I’m aware of the security risk. But some people think there are at least 2 kinds of security risks. One of those is related to the personal freedom and self determination. The other one is said to be of much higher importance. And both sides have valid arguments.
Hmmm If you pay $204MM, what would you expect? The goal is to make business and not burning $204MM. It’s evident.