I started playing with Asterisk@Home and then quickly moved to Trixbox - It was “purchased” by Fonnality and after a few short months, all the Fonnality folks started fighting with the community and Gaslighting/Astroturfing to the point where it was no longer a viable option - Fonnality basically nuked the project and I had to move on to Elastix.
They got weird too, but luckily this was right around the time that Schmooze bought/absorbed the FreePBX project and put out a distro - way better than anything that came before and this improvement continued through the years that Tony and the crew had control of the project - in fact, I would say that the single biggest improvements to the product overall happened during these years - “the salad days”…
Initially when Schmooze was sold to Sangoma, things got even better - then the team from the transition started to move on to other projects, and the pace of improvements decreased dramatically - till we get to the current days.
FreePBX 17 being not a distro, but a roll-your-own overlay of Debian is fairly challenging for the community as a whole (as witnessed by all the posts about the process and it’s results) and continues today - A@H, Trixbox, Elastix, and previous FreePBX’s while never easy, were far easier than the current system of Deployment. I have been doing this for 20 years and am in the process of updating all my deployed systems, but I think the bar has probably been raised farther than a LOT of newbies are able to climb - remember that most people coming to FreePBX are coming from Windows-Land - Linux is not hard per-se, but it is WAY different from Windows and the learning curve is steep.
That is why posts like these are so depressing:
If you were to go into the Wayback machine and look at the forums for Trixbox, the exact same thing happened there - the community sensed problems with the stewardship of the project, started complaining about it (me too!) and were met with almost cookie-cutter responses similar to the ones in the above threads.
Sangoma has upped the ante by banning James Finstrom and now Tony Lewis - How can it possibly help to silence your critics instead of answering the questions and perhaps addressing the issues involved?
It will truly be a sad day if we have to abandon this project the way we had to abandon Trixbox and Elastix - but if you really look at the responses the above threads are getting and you were around last go-round, the similarities are eerie.
I hope some minds can change/soften and things can be addressed - because the way we are going always ends up the same place.
