On the forum over the past few months we have seen announcements about FreePBX staff leaving the company, but I have not seen much if anything from remaining or new staff who work on FreePBX.
I realize this is a community forum and maybe we have been spoiled by all the great posts here from @xrobau, @tm1000, @jfinstrom, and @tonyclewis over the years (sorry if I missed someone). And of course @lgaetz is still with us, both in terms of being on the staff and contributing in the forum. So who’s left / new? I think I speak for more than just myself in saying we’d like to hear more from you.
speaking for myself … i’ve tried to become more active in the forums and we are looking for ideas on how to engage that audience more effectively - the forums are where i ‘came from’ in essence and grew with the project early on and later with the company.
One thing we know is constant … change
yes some of the previous voices are missing and that allows room for new voices to be heard , new ideas to be shared , and new strategies to be portrayed in dealing with the community
Lorne is certainly one to recognize here as well as Kapil and his team who have been behind the scenes for some time now, predating the departures you mentioned. Franck is another name that’s been in the background for some time, he’s located in France. Im actually visiting San DIego today and will get some of the new names here as well
we are certainly more distributed - spanning many more geographic areas than prior days - Most important for me … i feel we are developing a great base for the project to continue moving forward with minds open to input from the wider community
Indeed, I’m working in Sangoma for 2 years and 6 months. I’m in dev team like Kapil.
I’m working from France.
Also, sorry, I’m not often on the forum, I know.
But don’t worry, FreePBX is not dead.
Great question! From a Sangoma perspective there are a number of people still directly involved at developmental and other levels. Jason Parker, Kapil Gupta, Lorne Gaetz, Chris Dolese, Philip Joseph, Mohit Mishra, Franck Danard, Walter Moon, and myself. There are also other people that work at Sangoma indirectly with the project as well.
While it was sad to see Tony and a few others leave, the beauty of open source is that it allows people to work with the project even if they’re not directly affiliated with Sangoma, if they so choose. In my other role over the Asterisk project, we’ve had a number of leadership transition changes over the years and life goes on and the project continues. FreePBX will also continue on, and we will do our best to keep delivering great software to you and others in the community.
Thanks for starting this thread @billsimon! It wasn’t until I read this, that I fully realized what the recent departures might look like to the regulars here. There are, of course many more Sangoma employees (including full time devs) working with FreePBX than what is reflected in forum post counts, a few have already chimed in here, and it’s likely you will see the occasional post from others going forward.
This is certainly something I expect to be true. But it is also true that this is a very active community and Sangoma needs to be seen and represented by more than “open a ticket” or “submit a bug report” posts. Thankfully, that has never really been the case, but with the some of the more visible posters departing it was feeling different around here.
I’m not a developer or employee of Sangoma but I use FreePBX and have been involved in Open Source since FreeBSD 1 days.
I will say flatly that FreePBX has reached software maturity. What is software maturity? Well what is software Immaturity?
Immaturity is when 80% of the users have problems and 20% are the border cases that do not have problems.
Maturity is when 80% of the users do NOT have problems and 20% are the border cases that DO have problems.
The nature of commercial software is that the money is in satisfying the 80%. The 80% are the ones using “normal” configurations, “normal” instruments, and pretty much running vanilla installs. The 20% are the outliers who want to run it on a Netgear router they fished out of a bin at Goodwill or an old Raspberry Pi that someone gave them for free.
It is typical with these projects that because people ONLY complain about what DOESEN’T work, that as time passes and the software matures, the forums will have fewer complaints about “normal” installs and more complaints about outlier installs and border cases. And since the outlier and border cases are not where the money is, in a mature program the forums are filled with complaints that are more and more of a waste of money to respond to, because they will never be profitable if fixed.
FreePBX can be proud that there’s less activity from employees because that just shows that it’s more profitable and more successful NOT less.
It does take filthy lucre to buy food for the developers who bring us this great product for free even though I know that saying that is taboo among some OSS people.
I know that most OSS users know all this but it DOES bear reminding people from time to time as painful as it is to consider that filthy lucre!
Unfortunately, one cannot equate the profitability and success of a project/product by the level of activity of the project members/employees in the community forum.
Ted, I should clarify. When I wrote “(for pay)” in the title, I did not mean to imply anything about the dual commercial and open-source natures of FreePBX. I simply meant to ask, who are the Sangoma-paid employees.
I’m sure they have more important things to do in their daily routines than come to this forum and answer unprofitable, trivial, or tangential questions. But, we enjoy their presence and I believe it helps connect the two “sides” of OSS and commercial that exist here.
Folks, while the forums are an excellent place to find help, they can’t answer all questions. Getting a hold of someone at Sangoma without a support credit or contract is impossible at best - at least offer a “one shot” deal so people can get answers to questions that they may not find here in the forums.
Always the best argument with OSS projects. Give me everything for free. Generally OSS projects make their revenue from the support channels so removing that is tricky. Plus many OSS projects just don’t have a support call center sitting around to take your support calls for free. They use mailing lists, forums, ticket trackers and email.
As for the one shot idea. So you pay $50 one time for support but it takes them 4 hours to close the issue with you. Which means that person just earned $12.50/hr to help you fix your issue, which could have been a FreePBX issue or your issue. You know how someone can make a profit off that type of hourly fee for support? Put the call center in India where $12.50 goes a very very long way.
Here’s the thing, I get asked to provide support for FreePBX by people who don’t want to pay the support credit fees to Sangoma. My rate is roughly $50/hour and in the end they pay me as much as they would have paid for the Sangoma credits yet they still feel like they saved on it. I’m still trying to figure out that logic, but whatever, they pay.
I’ll do “one shot” support for you, but it’s at my hourly rate, and I decide how many hours were billable. If you think Sangoma is expensive, you haven’t even started down the path to enlightenment.
Ask your questions here, get the answers we have. There are people from Sangoma that “hang out” here and will answer questions for free, but answering questions for free is why we have a community forum.
As @cynjut and @BlazeStudios said, various people do support for all kinds of systems. My company’s standard consulting rate is $150/hour, I would never do work for $50/hour. If you don’t want to pay someone for their knowledge and skill, then hunker down and spend all the time to learn it yourself. I can guarantee you that you will spend more money doing it your way, and for what benefit? How many times are you going to be installing a PBX in your career?
I do consulting work and work for hire please contact with your project requests.
Currently as of 10/2/19 working on CentOS 7/8 integration Asterisk 15/16 FreePBX 14/15 and IAXModem 1.3.0 should have some results within a few days… Working late
I am still here too folks, have to look, first post has to be close to 15 years old. I too am guilty of not being active, my role at Sangoma is not PBX related.
However, I am going to try and get active again and help answering questions and take shots from Dicko.
