Who's steering the FreePBX development boat?

And the next problem is how that is broken up

There’s a splitting of the market with the small customers going to cloud for telephony and the large ones staying with on prem. For very obvious networking reasons I won’t bother going into. So if you are like Microsoft and are 100% cloud telephony then you are excluded from the large customers. Not a problem for them though since you make far more money with 50 customers buying 500 licenses each than 1 customer buying 25k licenses because the 1 customer is going to insist on and get a discount.

But there is still money to be made with the 1 customer buying 25k licenses if you can sell an on-prem deal

With the Microsoft’s of the world they already looked at the hardware and aren’t interested so they push softphones nowadays. Or push SBC connections that tie into your on prem pbx

As you say hardware by itself does not generate recurring revenue, but when it is coupled with a recurring revenue product (like a trunk to PSTN, or a videoconferencing server in the cloud) then it keeps you in business.

I’m not a C programmer but I did the initial work to identify this bug and I’ve been paying a development group to work on it, which created this PR:

file.c: Convert RTP timestamp deltas to millisecond delays by AryanM200 · Pull Request #1753 · asterisk/asterisk

I’ve also been personally testing it. Discussions on the PR spawned this one:

rtp: Use timestamp difference for video playback rate. by gareth-palmer · Pull Request #1909 · asterisk/asterisk

And I also worked with Gareth to provide testing and research support to develop the:

rtptransmit - Play a .wav file on one more phones at the same time using the legacy RTP streaming API

command that is part of this:

usecallmanagernz/commands: Command line utilities.

He did not realize there was an old and a new API until I dug it out for him.

I also did hours and hours of work to identify a bug in the DD_WRT implementation of openvpn which was trashing VoIP rtp traffic passed over an openvpn VPN, that is documented here:

DD-WRT :: View topic - OpenVPN defect, bug, on MTU handling - you decide�����������

That did ultimately result in changes to DD_wrt that fixed the black hole and allowed for functioning VoIP over a lan2lan openvpn. This worked for several years until another openvpn breakage in April of 2025 broke SIP over it permanently on dd-wrt. I elected to not pursue troubleshooting on that since the attitude of DD-WRT devs today is that problems with UDP traffic over openvpn VPNs are not their problem to worry about since everything today is either TCP or UDP that implements PMTUD. Since as a rule many VoIP telephones either don’t implement PMTUD at all for rtp traffic or if they do it’s badly broken, (since they assume they are on a LAN with no part of it on a real VPN - an asinine assumption but what do you expect from desktop phone firmware monkeys) it seems better to just find desk phones with correctly coded SIP stacks if you are going to use them over a lan2lan VPN.

So, yeah, I’ve contributed. Not perhaps on something super obvious and flashy like a FreePBX module - but what good is a module if there’s something in the core that does not work? Fix the flaws in the engine first, then worry about the paint. And the engine is in Asterisk

Well those goalposts move pretty fast.

Fortunately, the moves are slowing. We are almost out from the last of the H.264 patents I think the last ones expire next year, and the trolling patents added to the patent pool cover things that don’t need to be implemented and are unnecessary and clearly are just last gasp attempts to keep milking it and I don’t think any of the major open source codecs cover them.

HEVC is going to be milked for another decade at least - but the benefits for simple things like videophones, doorphones, and the like of H.265 over H.264 are so minimal that it’s not surprising none of the makers building hardware videophones are bothering to implement HEVC.

Asterisk has at least another decade to get its act together with H.264 before worrying about HEVC, in my view. OVIF is causing some interoperability problems with older videophone product that does not implement it, but nothing that is that serious I think.

I was more talking about how you asked what others have actually contributed to FreePBX and then when an answer is given detailing contributions and you’re asked what you’ve contributed to FreePBX the goalposts on contribution moved to indirect things you’ve provided feedback on and how that counts. Yes, you paid a bug bounty for something in Asterisk but that’s not contributing to FreePBX directly (as you asked others) is it?

Except that I was never the one demanding what you seem to be saying I am demanding, or complaining about contributions, or lack thereof.

My suggestion, Tom, is you start over from the beginning and reread the thread because every question you have posted, hypothetical or not, has been answered, and every point you have raised, has also been answered.

@penguinpbx you may want to run an audit of that group, there’s clearly a few names that are no longer associated with Sangoma.

True, but also not entirely true, a good product that just works and works and works, gets a good name, people recommend it, more sales, those new purchases in time of course find it so reliable they too recommend it. (repeat cycle)

Word of mouth is by far the best advertising

Nothing just works anymore.

My client has NEC DSX-80 with 15 extensions running flawlessly for 18 years. They are happy with hardware quality and fully satisfied for basic voice calling but they also want to add call recordings, CRM integration, soft phones, call accounting, etc without replacing hardware. I can’t even access it without win7

I can replace it all in a day and get them everything they want plus monthly subscription and commission for me. Or spend a week on questionable integrations with sip gateways, smdr, scripts and lots of headache with more maintenance for me and one time charge.

They’ve been enjoying free ride for so long, the idea of monthly subscription sounds like ripoff to them.

Depending on the size of the company, I’ve seen both sides of the coin. Larger companies I’ve worked at would eventually go with the flow and adopt newer tech, with more encompassing subscription fees. Smaller companies OTOH, would ride out the old, reliable tech until I could no longer stock spare components off scouring eBay. Looking at you, Merlin Legend. lol.