Who's steering the FreePBX development boat?

FreePBX Development
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21

Well James alone has done 18+ PR’s over the last three years. I really haven’t looked at the individual commits from each and every ClearlyIP employee but then again, not every ClearlyIP employee (including those formerly of Sangoma) actual wrote code for FreePBX. Being employed at Sangoma does not equal working on FreePBX since there’s more than FreePBX being done at Sangoma.

Hate to break this to you, so does Sangoma. You do realize that Sangoma hasn’t released anything of meaning or of relevance as an Open Source module in years. Every new module Sangoma has introduced to FreePBX in the last few years as been 100% commercial with may be a “free use” tier that doesn’t really help. Any work on the open source side has mainly been bug fixes and making updates that impact their commercial offerings.

Any new features/updates added to the OSS side has been from the community not from Sangoma.

22

So here’s the latest perceived existential threat to FreePBX. Somehow they never quite kill it. I do think it is time for someone to fork it and begin redeveloping it. I pretty much have moved away from FreePBX and now am concentrating on FS PBX for my systems. Large or small system, it does the job.

23

We do not sell any commercial modules.

  1. Yes we offer SIP Trunking like over 10k other providers in the US alone do so we are not unique here. Yes there are over 10k providers in the US alone.
  2. Yes we manufacture and sell a line of SIP Phones like over 20 other manufactures do. News flash our phones are sold outside of FreePBX way more than connected to a FreePBX system. The market is huge. As James pointed out already FreePBX and Sangoma and Clearly combined are not even 1% of the market so why would we focus on that small part of the market?
  3. Our 2 largest PBX offerings have nothing to do with FreePBX and are not based on or use any code of FreePBX.
  4. We have almost 200 staff members and the vast majority of our business has nothing to do with FreePBX or based on FreePBX.
24

If ClearlyIP’s two largest PBX products have nothing to do with FreePBX, the vast majority of your 200 staff have nothing to do with FreePBX, your phones sell mostly outside the FreePBX market, and FreePBX plus Sangoma plus ClearlyIP combined are less than 1% of the market — then why are ClearlyIP employees the most vocal voices in this thread about who is or isn’t steering FreePBX development?
You’ve just made the case that ClearlyIP has largely moved on from FreePBX as a core business But then the criticism of Sangoma’s stewardship of a project you’ve described as a rounding error in your business feels a bit rich. Sangoma, for all its problems, is still the one holding the bag on FreePBX.

Who at ClearlyIP is?

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As the long time steward and sponsor of the project I am still attached to the project. It’s part of my professional and personal legacy. Why would I not care about the direction of the project? One can care without having a financial motivation, can they not?

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It looks like more than care to me

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These people are my friends and personal connections. Of course if they come looking for a job and we have a need I am going to hire them. You literally are making my case for me. People work for people not companies.

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The em dash says you are getting your responses from AI. I believe community standards linked somewhere says you are suppose to disclose use of generative AI… To answer the question have you ever actually created something. FreePBX outside any business interest or non interest FreePBX is the byproduct of thousands of hours of blood sweat and tears (figuratively speaking, not sure anyone actually bled but certainly there was crying.) In any case yes there are those of us still very attached to the project and want to see it flourish.

And would have a lot more but (puts on tinfoil hat) magically my PRs started getting rejected and ignored. Someone somewhere decided our contributions are an optics problem. I still contribute but I am now doing it as a forks with another unmentioned project. The code goes on github and they can pull it upstream if desired. Things need to get fixed and I don’t have the time or energy to deal with all the politics.

Can’t respond to this and have tried avoiding mention of things not to get “community flagged” but code is happening. There is even an unrelated thing by Rob I don’t know the status of. As mentioned in my previous reply the beauty of open source is the code all exist and is portable. At the end of the day FreePBX won’t die. Worse case the trademark dies but FreePBX is already the projects second name because of trademarks so…

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Yes I used AI to help me articulate my thoughts, english is my second language and it helps me express myself better, the opinions and research behind it are still mine

30

Let’s not get carried away here. The multifactor auth module was written by Sangoma and made commercial then the commercial restrictions on it were removed so I think that yes that DOES help a number of people who are operating in environments where 2FA is required.

I will also point out that FreePBX is the body and paint of the car while Asterisk is the engine. As a user of FreePBX, while I might like, for example, EPM to be enhanced to work with, say, Cisco 3PCC firmware phones, I understand completely that if the body of the car has a dent in it and the paint is scratched, I can still use it, while if the engine is damaged, I can’t. My users don’t see the FreePBX interface they see the Cisco 3PCC phone interface, and that does not work without the Asterisk engine working smoothly.

Sangoma’s primary responsibility as project sponsor is to maintain the engine, Asterisk, the FreePBX interface is just the glitz. It’s not required to provision phones, nor is it required to run the engine. Asterisk can be configured without it, if necessary. Not that I would WANT to do that, of course so I’m thankful for FreePBX - the configuration directives used for Asterisk are as bad as the configuration directives used for Sendmail - but I think we need to keep our eye on the prize, here.

31

Once more let’s not get carried away here. For starters that 140B isn’t even correct it’s 160B, see:

VoIP Services Market Size & Top Players Analysis, 2032

That $160 B comprises a LOT of recurring revenue that does nothing other than go into shareholders pockets and ultimately ends up paying for maintenance of the PSTN copper and fiber networks that cover the world. The article linked above estimated around 50% of that.

Sangoma may be supplying SIP trunks but for those to be any good they have to interconnect to the PSTN and global Internet and pay recurring fees to them. So most of the money people paying Sangoma for SIP trunks is being sent upstream to someone else. Same goes with every other SIP provider other than an actual Telco like Lumen that owns significant fiber. They also pay interconnect fees but they collect call fees also. On the data side these companies don’t even bother exchanging money anymore they sign “peering agreements” So this 160B you are referring to is actually “funny money” that is, it doesn’t exist at all in the fundamental “I’ll handle your calls if you handle my calls and we will both soak the consumer” mutual back scratching club.

The entire telephony industry is basically a huge group of people and the money is passed from person to person with everyone taking their cut.

So it’s not like much of this 160B is even available for Sangoma to take.

The 160B market you talk about is NOT in telephony hardware and PBX sales.

And even the hardware - Sangoma doesn’t make phones they contract it out to China. And desk phone firmware microcode has been around for 20 years now it’s “fully baked” it not like any of these “desk phone telephone companies” are putting much time into developing it further.

Same goes for those Switchvox boxes Sangoma sells, those are made in China and Sangoma only gets some of the money for them. Same with Cisco and their phone systems (where literally every bit of hardware is made overseas)

Not to mention that only those Cadillac customers are able to forklift replace all desk phones when they replace a PBX. That’s WHY FreePBX’s EPM supports Yealink and other phones is to allow it to be dropped in to replace whatever PBX the customer is using.

Sales dollar amounts are meaningless and that’s what you are throwing around when you write $140B. What matters is profit. If Sangoma is making $230M and handing $220M a year over to vendors that’s a whole different ballgame then them making $230M a year and handing $50M over to vendors and the rest they are spreading around to employees and stockholders. And many of the $140B chunk you talked about is indeed the company charging $5 and then paying $4 to someone else.

I would imagine companies like Vonage and Ring Central are paying insanely high fees to their network interconnects so I think you get what I mean.

I don’t think that just throwing around dollar amounts helps anyone understand telco.

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Let’s not forget that commercial modules, regardless of their pricing or licensing, are closed source. So don’t matter if it’s free to use or not, it’s not open source. Sangoma has not produced anything open source for FreePBX in a very, very long time. All the new modules have been closed source and commercial licensed.

It’s almost like the open source parts are maintained in order for them to produce close source modules and addons for the “open source PBX”

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But the way that many open source projects work today is by supplying a core that is FOSS and then additional add-in modules that they charge for.

Nowhere is this more obvious with FreePBX than the endpoint manager. There is the OSS Endpoint Manager and there’s been at least 4 forks and efforts of that, in fact I discussed that and posted instructions for it almost 2 years ago here:

OSS Endpoint Manager keeps crashing - FreePBX / Applications / Modules - FreePBX Community Forums

The problem with this, of course, is that one of the revenue streams supporting FreePBX is the sale of Sangoma telephones. EPM is not FOSS because the FreePBX maintainers/sponsors basically say you can do your phone provisioning 1 of 4 ways - 1 is pay us for our phones and use EPM for free, 2 is pay us for EPM and use cheap phones you get elsewhere that may or may not match the models in EPM, 3 is write and maintain your own provisioner (OSSEPM) or 4 is do your provisioning outside of FreePBX. (tftp+text editor)

1 & 2 are “easier” and “supported” but cost money, 3 & 4 are “harder” and “unsupported” but are free.

I can almost guarantee those many would read my OSSEM posting, see that “oh boy this is going to take a few hours to digest” and then pay the money for EPM. And what is wrong with that?

The whole point of FOSS is you can have it either served to you on a silver platter and you pay for that, or you can haul your own water from the well for free.

The Open Source part of FreePBX works fine. If you do as I did and put time into learning about Asterisk and learning about FreePBX and experimenting and testing and so on, you can produce a phone system that costs nothing other than the cost of your time, that works well and that people can use on a daily basis. There isn’t any key critical piece of FreePBX that is behind a paywall that prevents you from creating a working phone system. Even EPM - I don’t use OSSEPM myself, I only set it up just to see how difficult it would be to do - I use tftp and a text editor - the fact that an “uncommercial” install of FreePBX does not include EPM; is not a barrier to making a PBX from it.

I learned about the Retail Triangle 45 years ago as a teenager. If you want top quality, on demand, you are going to pay top dollar. I have taught both of my kids that people only pay you for doing something that they don’t want to do or doing something they can’t do. The vast majority of people don’t want to spend time learning; the vast majority of IT people can’t build a PBX from Open Source. Companies like Sangoma exist to make money from the vast majority of people who don’t want to spend time learning about phone systems, and because they don’t want to spend the time learning, they can’t set them up. But they can pick up the phone and throw money (that they don’t own usually) to Sangoma who can serve it up to them on a silver platter. I do NOT begruge Sangoma or any other FOSS project (such as fspbx) for this because those people who don’t want to learn, are essentially paying for my toys.

When FOSS projects lose sight of this, and they start spending more and more of their development time on the glitz, and not the core, then what you have happen is EXACTLY what just happened not more than 4 days ago with CVE-2026-31431 aka Copy Fail. Seriously, do you know just how many different Linux distros there are out there that merely skin either Slack or Debian or RedHat? Think of the enormous amount of developer time that has been sunk into nothing more than fluff - interface code - producing all those distros. And in the meantime while all those smart dedicated people with the light of religion in their eyes who just KNEW that they had a “better” skin than the other guy were hacking away on fluffy interface code producing distro after distro - that copy fail bug was latent with no attention on it from any of those smart people. Until xinit came along and published it.

Makes me wonder how long the NSA and China PRC have known about copy fail and how long they have been exploiting it to fry people and blow up stuff.

I think Sangoma is right where they are supposed to be - focused on the core. FreePBX works. They put a TON of work into moving it off RedHat/Centos to Debian. They COULD have just punted it from CentOS over to Rocky Linux (another red hat derivative) with less work. But putting it on Debian makes it easy as pie to deploy on Ubuntu which is the single largest Linux distro. If people want more FOSS modules for FreePBX nothing is stopping them from writing them - just like OSSEPM.

The question shouldn’t be why isn’t Sangoma releasing more FOSS modules for FreePBX. The question should be why aren’t ClearlyIP, and CrossTalk Solutions, and other commercial entities releasing more FOSS modules for FreePBX.

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ya know, as one who has been trained in investigations and forensics, i feel i have to address the question on I’m sure a few peoples minds…

if it smells like a sangoma_employee, quacks like a sangoma_employee, it probably is, a sangoma_employee

35

You are funny :laughing:

I’m in the same boat as you are, really hoping FreePBX survives for years to come and doesn’t ditch me like 3CX, NEC, Panasonic, Nortel… the list goes on. Last thing I want is to be defending Sangoma, I just want my PBX to keep working.

36

It should 100% be the question. Sangoma markets and pushes themselves as the stewards of the biggest open source PBX project out there. That they are innovators and leaders in the open source space. The reality is this project hasn’t seen a new open source module (or huge feature adds) produced by Sangoma since around 2015 when the XMPP, REST API and TTS Engines modules where released. So for the last decade, and I might point out the entire time Sangoma has owned FreePBX, they haven’t produced any real new open source anything. In fact, they’ve actually made some of the open source modules now dependant on commercial modules.

Basically for the last decade FreePBX has been more about Sangoma pushing commercial code over the open source parts. They’ve even broken their own EOL/SFO policies in 2025 for their Scribe module. FreePBX v15 was EOL when Scribe was launched and none of the modules should have gotten updates but they did so that Sangoma could push Scribe on to an EOL version to make sure their new commercial module had maximum exposure.

So the stewards of one of the largest OSS projects out there and a “leader in open source” hasn’t done anything of merit, note or significance in regards to open source in a decade. But hey, let’s ask why others aren’t doing things.

Disclaimer: This is in the context of FreePBX and not Asterisk, which I view as separate

37

Well, the original AMP/FreePBX code from 2014 is still out there languishing on Sourceforge so if anyone wants to fork it…

I’m honestly not trying to minimize what you are saying. This is the central dichotomy of when a commercial sponsor takes over a FOSS project - encumberment.

FOSS projects that are gigantic - X windows for example - never have a shortage of devs who will continue to put effort into them - and fork them the second it appears as though the project is in danger of commercial encumberment. I think there’s been like 7 forks of X for example - one even with the word “free” as part of the name specifically to emphasize this.

It’s the FOSS projects that are niche where this is an issue. They aren’t large enough to attract critical mass to keep them maintained, and they aren’t small enough that if they dry up and blow away that they won’t cause problems. The FOSS community has grappled with what to do about this for a very long time. And the answer has been to get in bed with commercial operators with these projects. But of course the commercial operator has a financial incentive to encumber aspects of the FOSS project but not to the point that it tees off so many devs out in the community that they stop contributing code.

Keep sounding the alarm on this with FreePBX as it’s never going to go away, there will always be the subtle pressure to encumber the FOSS code. But also remember there is pressure to NOT encumber the code because you’re not going to get anyone contributing to a FOSS project that they regard as a commercial project. The real question with FreePBX is what defines usability - are there key usability features that should not be encumbered with commercial code? From my POV I can use it in free mode and get value out of it so I tend to fall on the “it’s still FOSS at the core” side of the debate. You may be on the other side of the debate.

As a summary I’ll leave everyone to ponder the famous XKCD comic - is FreePBX one of the thanklessly maintained projects?

dependency
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As a former Sangoma employee, Im soo sad to see FreePBX lose a great Engineer and Friend. At the same time, ClearlyIP has gained someone very valuable.

Wishing congratulations to @kgupta (Kapil Gupta) and GL on his new role at ClearlyIP. All The Best in this next chapter. :victory_hand:

39

I did a quick search around VoIP and Unified communications. Sangoma when I worked there and in I see no indication that has changed has no intention of or desire to be in the hardware business. That is a legacy vertical for them and in other positions done as a necessity. Fun fact my company also has no desire to be a hardware company or to live in that vertical but there is some necessity to be there. Hardware does not bring the one thing you mentioned. Reoccurring revenue which is what keeps you in business. One off sales was always kind of a terrible ideal. Less so when you make good products. Sangoma TDM cards and equipment were once considered some of the best in the industry. Hard to make money when you sell something that just works. You have to rely on natural desasters and other acts of god to happen for repeat business.

For :poop: and giggles lets cut the numbers down to 25%. $35 Billion. Lets say the VoIP and UC industry is only $35 billion. The last 4 quarters Sangoma’s reported income was $220 Million rounded up. Groovy we just brought their market share up to a whopping, mind bending, unbelievable 0.63% of the market. Let’s assume again my company is running comparable numbers. With out powers combined we are captain plan… no that’s not it… We are 1.26% of the market. I think we could mess with these numbers a lot more and be 10-20% of the market share and my point holds. We have no need to compete with eachother. If we somehow got to that 20% mark there is still 80% to grab. Once one of us gets over 50% respectively we can go all WWE or MMA and battle. I am optimistic but not that optimistic.

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You apparently haven’t been on github. I can’t say where but I am sure you can figure it out. It is named after an old frog friend. Any way there is open source modules and fixes being posted there that the beauty of open source can always be used or pulled upstream. I have recently reworked the freepbx-node interface to work properly with IPv6 and have some other projects in flight to be released under that umbrella and it is all open sourced. How many modules or patches have you contributed ever?