Yes, indeed. This module generator has been created when FreePBX 14 was out or before 15 anyway.
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Correct.
Yes - and No. It’s complicated.
With most FOSS projects the “responsibility” of the “customer AKA user” is to contribute bug fixes for things that affect them. It is the old “hey, quit complaining - you have the source code that got you 99% of the way there - write the 1% that needs fixing yourself and contribute it to the code or hire someone else to do it and contribute back to the code”
But as far as fixing bugs that DON’T affect you but DO affect OTHER users - that in my view is a whole different ballgame. I don’t see that any user/customer/etc. of Asterisk or FreePBX has any responsibility to contribute a bug fix back for a bug that does not affect them, (and maybe they don’t even have the environment to duplicate) unless it is something that is trivial for them to contribute.
For example, I’ve posted before on integrating the very latest most current version of the open source free EPM into FreePBX. It works, in that it does not cause FreePBX 17 to crash, and it goes generate config files for some phones that do work. I didn’t fix it up to work with the latest FreePBX 17, someone else did. Is this plugin a feature? Or are the “bugs” in it that keep it from working under the latest PHP actual bugs? The prior release of OSS EPM works fine under FreePBX16 after all.
Well possibly because when people who DO post help responses do it, then later on when people have the same problems they aren’t searching the forums? Where the problem might have been answered before? Is it their responsibility to keep posting the same answers over and over?
Now as for the ban thing:
In general I don’t agree with forum bans because I have seen them abused too often and the biggest abuse are so called “lifetime” bans. That’s like saying people don’t have the capability of reforming. This is, after all, just words - electronic words on an electronic forum and it’s complete child’s play.
A lifetime ban would be appropriate for example for someone “outing” the real name and address of a poster on some political forum dealing with China when the poster is living in China because that could result in someone being arrested in real life or simply killed. But for people posting silly “your an A hole no your an A hole no your an A hole” stuff while arguing technology? Are you effing serious? I’m sorry but in the grand scheme of things, posting someone’s technical screwup about code they wrote incorrectly about a dumb telephone set the manufacturer is going to EOL in 5 years anyway, is simply just not important at all and someone banning anyone for this has a way overinflated view of their importance and the importance of said dumb telephone set in the grand scheme of things.
Now, can we PLEASE get back to the tech and future of Sangoma, and FreePBX? We sound like a bunch of Democrats arguing with each other over who’s going to put the house fire out in the house we are all standing in while the Republicans are throwing Molotov cocktails at the house. LOL.
We have a situation in Telephony where yeah a lot of people are going to the cloud. So what! How many times do I and others have to post financial analyses of moving from on-prem to the cloud showing it costs more, how many cloud repatriation stories do we have to post before you all get it that someone moving their org to the cloud has NOTHING TO DO with FreePBX.
In closing, I have a picture I took today, to show you all.
THERE YOU GO this is EXACTLY what a “cloud PBX is worth” Absolutely NOTHING. I went down to this auction today, and on top of this batch of beauties was a user manual describing how to use them with the “Zoom cloud phone system”
“Going to the cloud” didn’t help this particular enterprise ONE IOTA from keeping going bankrupt. Whaddya know!!! Who’d a thunk!!!
So would you please quit going on and on about how Sangoma is abandoning FreePBX for their Switchvox cloud and their whatever the heck cloud phone system they are pushing???
(PS I give Sangoma the right to use this picture in their marketing if they wish! LOL)
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I’m not sure how showing phones designed for a specific voice system like Zoom being sold is any different than Mitel, Panasonic or even Cisco who require specific phones to use the functionality of their voice system. The only difference here is that Zoom is in the cloud instead of a system in your server room at your office.
I’m not sure I’ve seen one of your analyses on this subject. What I can say is most of the analyses I have seen always seem to be an MRC to MRC comparison which is really an apple to oranges comparison. They tend to leave out things like the cost of the server, licenses and other items that add to the initial cost of the PBX. They also seem to ignore any support or maintenance charges that may occur over time. Which means most of these are based on feels.
Paying $300/month for cloud services can feel like a lot compare to spending $4,000 over the year for usage, DIDs, 911, support, maintenance and licenses but when it is all said and done it was $3,600 vs $4,000.
Really they both have their pros and their cons. Blindly going either way with out doing a proper comparison is just silly. In a lot of cases there are features that cloud provide as part of the line/user seat where as with on-prem you have to pay for it and do all the integration yourself. I find that people being on one side and just disparaging the other (cloud vs on-prem and vice versa) paints them into a corner and limits them.
I just had a customer want a quote to go to the cloud because they are getting rid of all their on-prem systems including their PBXes (they have two for failover). They have 780+ phones, I gave them two quotes. One for their 780 phones on our cloud system with all the features provided and one where we move their on-prem PBXes hosted in the cloud. They made a comment that they didn’t ask for the latter quote and I told them “Yeah, I know. But this is going to be the better option for you so I put it out there”. They are going with the latter option.
Even with giving both options and letting them decide, the split for us is still about 85% / 15% (hosted/on-prem) for our client base.
“I’m not sure how showing phones designed for a specific voice system like Zoom being sold is any different than Mitel, Panasonic or even Cisco who require specific phones to use the functionality of their voice system”
I will point out that those Polycom phones are as generic a VoIP phone as possible and can easily be reset and unlocked from Zoom, and run on ANY VoIP system. They work without issue with Asterisk. I’ll further point out the entire point of VoIP is to have a standards-based system not a proprietary one. Those phones were not Zoom-specific they were Poly Edge E220 models. They can even be unlocked and used on ANY cloud phone vendor. Even yours, I daresay.
Virtually all Cloud PBX marketing today is of the FUD variety - it is all based on the claim that “cloud is better” and it ignores all the subsidiary costs. So I won’t apologize for fighting FUD with FUD.
Even in the comparison you listed in this post, you failed to list the fact that going to cloud increases load on the customers Internet connection and decreases reliability slightly because previously an on-prem system had a separate connection to the PSTN that was dedicated, while now the extensions have to compete with websurfing and all the other garbage that’s coming in over the Internet connection. And it’s NOT the internal switches that are the bottleneck. The entire network needs to be evaluated in the choice of cloud-vs-on-prem.
Cloud makes sense when the org does not have the IT talent to maintain on prem - but it’s always going to be more expensive than a properly sized and supported phone system when all costs are looked at because you have to pay for the tech time to manage the phone system. If it’s in the cloud then the tech is working for the cloud provider and the cloud provider is going to apply a markup - they pay the tech $200 an hour they need to get that money from the customer - and they will add 30% on top of that so ultimately the customer pays. And yes I’m aware you can juice up a quote to say that they are spending $4k a year on DIDs, 911, support and maintenance - and unfortunately we have vendors like Cisco who are looking at cloud as a way of putting golden handcuffs on customers so it makes it hard for them to move to a competitor - who juice up their on-prem products prices and artificially lower their cloud prices to encourage people to dump their on prem because once they do the institutional knowledge goes with it and it makes it doubly harder to shift to a different vendor. All of this muddies the waters for customers to get a meaningful analysis which is why so many of these systems end up being sold due to customer relations.
You, Tom, have a customer you want to take from on-prem to cloud, if it’s a customer you have had for years they trust you, all you need to do to do it is hand them a quote for cloud PBX that’s marginally lower and you have them. I’m not saying that is a terrible business model and indeed it’s how a lot of business is transacted - but I AM saying that FreePBX and Asterisk are fundamentally on-premise single-org products (particularly FreePBX) Yes they can be pressed into use in the cloud with “Individual PBXes hosted in the cloud” which is a different kind of cloud model than, say, Webex is where all customers are dumped into the same box, with some partitions inside the box. But they have an on-prem focus and I’m sick of people saying that just because of that, they are going to be dumped in favor of Cloud.
Last I’ll point out that in an underdog growing industry that aims to raid customers from an established industry it’s standard practice to lowball pricing then once you have locked in your customers, to jack the pricing way up. That is where Cloud of all types is headed it just phone systems.
The history of phone systems is ever since the breakup of the Bell company all hardware vendors have tried doing hardware lock-in. They all came out with proprietary phone systems that only worked with THEIR phones.
With VoIP, customers have the opportunity to return things to the way they were back in the days of the Bell system where you could buy a phone from ANY vendor. Phone vendors thus had real meaningful competition which kept pricing down for hardware.
Meaningful competition was forced in by the FCC after the breakup by defining RBOCs and CLECs for the trunks/lines but that did not last long. It DOES happen TODAY in the mobile cellular space but the landline market is headed back into proprietaryville for the vendors of hardware.
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No, not at all. The customer wanted to move to the cloud, no prompting or pressure from me because I knew it wouldn’t be beneficial to them price wise. Which is why they got a second quote for their own VM instances to move their current systems to. Allowing them to transfer all their commercial modules and have a very little price change in their MRC. Again, I did not want to take them to the cloud. I should also add additional clarification such as they are a customer because I provided them with FreePBX support. Don’t their trunking, DIDs or anything outside of support FreePBX. I wasn’t even the only quotes on the table, I was just the only one that recognized their request was not realistic and gave them a realistic option.
You’re making an assumption here that there is a separate Internet connection just for their voice or that the voice is being delivered over copper. Even if there was a separate Internet connection for the voice services, putting the PBX in the cloud doesn’t mean that Internet connection can’t be used for the voice services still. I’ve done that plenty of times.
An active SIP call is 160Kbps (g711 80Kbps up and 80Kbps down) if audio is flowing both ways. Having 20 concurrent calls is 1.6Mbps upload and 1.6Mbps download. So unless the Internet connection can’t support an additional couple of Mbps of traffic I can’t see how much fighting needs to be done. Even replacing a TDM based PRI with a 100Mbps dedicated Internet connection is saving money and most of that bandwidth would never be used.
To expand on this, that customer in question has 20+ locations and they register their phones to the main office over the main offices Internet connection. The majority of the 780 phones is not in the main office location. They’ve never once had issues with their Internet or having to “fight over” anything, calls are clear and audio issues don’t exist. So for one office the PBX is on-prem for the other 20 or so offices, it’s in the cloud.
If each location has an independent Internet connection and only a few phones, then for all intents, even if the PBX is on prem at the main site, from the remote sites POV the PBX is_already “in the cloud” It’s just that the cloud server in that case is the main office. That is in fact exactly the use case that argues for the cloud. Of course, there’s the pesky detail that you have 20+ internet connections you have to pay for, and it’s hard as nails to control and monitor websurfing at all those locations, and outages are a royal pain to chase down - but if you already have gone down that road then moving the PBX from one of the 20 sites into some “cloud” server at a datacenter somewhere else is really just an academic discussion, you have already decentralized your network you are just putting the final nail into it. And depending on the business you may not really care that you don’t have central control on the WAN
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Of course, if no brands like Cisco or Alcatel use a custom SIP.
Cloud or no Cloud. It’s for different cases and different usages.
If all extensions are not on the same office, the Cloud is good.
If you’ve got 200 extensions to manage in the office, it’s another beer.
If the Cloud exists, it’s done for a type of client. Some prefer a physical server.
So would you please quit going on and on about how Sangoma is abandoning FreePBX for their Switchvox cloud and their whatever the heck cloud phone system they are pushing???
Who said that Sangoma will abandon FreePBX for their Switchvox cloud? Switchvox on prem seems to be still on their agenda
Yes, I’m worry about that too.
The fact to promot only Switchvox Cloud is not good for PBXact Cloud so, FreePBX as well, And this fact doesn’t come from yestereday. No promotion with 50 / 50 of these products is done, it’s always Switchvox cloud. Weird isn’t it?
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And that’s the reason, why @lgaetz left…just my personal guess 
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I don’t think so. when you are a multitasker, one day you might get tired of it. It’s just my opinion.
Thanks for saying to me what I already said.
I do not know what you are talking about here. It is not hard as nails to control or even monitor the web surfing (or even other traffic) or outages from those locations. The amount of tracking down an outage is the alert that is sent out went an outage happens. There are plenty of solutions out there that can handle these tasks pretty easy. Here’s a little snapshot of a quick view of a location being monitor.
Being able to monitor specific things takes a little bit of extra setup but yeah, not really hards as nails and not much trouble in tracking down outages. Being doing this for decades in regards of monitoring locations and sites for customers.
What does this even mean and how are you basing all this just on the PBX and nothing else that is being done? What central control are you talking about?
Hi, Dan Jenkins here, some of you may know me from the Asterisk community - I haven’t been one for much FreePBX development myself and so haven’t been on these forums. However this post got brought to my attention and I wanted to add my backing to the “free james” movement. A 2 month ban - for a decision that was apparently made by looking at the code of conduct I’m a little surprised there isn’t some form of standard ban time for seriousness of offence. Banning someone for 2 months for asking questions of a publicly traded company considering they are themselves a shareholder is absolute madness. There are many other ways you could have dealt with this using Discourse’s controls.
For a long time, I’ve been worried about the direction of Open Source at Sangoma. Fred Posner and I even met with Bill back in 2019 where we were assured that Sangoma would do the right thing (Astricon 2019 Thoughts). Asterisk is facing the exact same questions from those in the community (or whatever is left of it) as what were asked here of FreePBX.
I can’t agree more with @GeekBoy 's reply referring to the reasons for the ban (Support, Quality, Cutting corners - #35 by GeekBoy). This is a completely over the top reaction to fair questions from a long term community member, committer of code and ultimately a sangoma shareholder.
The silence from Sangoma in this post since the ban is deafening. If you’re not going to actually contribute then just lock the post - but then that would go to prove James’ points.
I have no stake in Sangoma, no shares, I was never employed by Sangoma - I was a contractor with Digium for a while long before the Sangoma acquisition. Remember that Sangoma data breach a few years back? Another example of Sangoma not handling things the right way considering they’re a publicly traded company.
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@danjenkins thank you as someone not typically on here, making it a point to say this.
#FREEJAMES
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@danjenkins we both know that since you are not a paying customer Sangoma does not value your opinion as you have learned the hard way the last few years. Are you planning on going to Sangoma World ie (Astricon) this year? Would love to catch up over a beer its been to many years.
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I’d like to drink some beer with you too before to die.
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So I guess it’s pretty obvious here that users can get banned with impunity at any time, and there’s nothing that any of us can do about it. Thank you for clearing that up for us @penguinpbx and good luck everyone 
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You might want to review this also. FreePBX Updated Terms of Use (VERY IMPORTANT CHANGES) - #3 by tonyclewis