It’s been quiet on the blog for a few weeks as I’ve been in catch-up mode having been on vacation for a while, away from all forms of internet and telephony technology, and afterwards, I just got back from a week of another successful Open Telephony Training Seminar.

Let’s get on to the subject of this post though. Many of you readers are part of our large trixbox installed base and we have enjoyed working with you since the days of Asterisk@Home and the transition of its corporate take over by Fonality. Most of you have probably seen Fonality’s announcement that they have forked the FreePBX project so that they can re-brand it as trixbox in their on-going efforts to remove signs of other key projects in order to strengthen their identity and branding.

There has been substantial discussion, speculation, emotions, opinions, inaccurate information and everything else that comes out of such heated moves since Fonality’s announcement. I have delayed a reply in order to hear from you, the community, so that I could attempt to speak on your behalf. FreePBX operates significantly differently from Fonality. Trixbox is run in a “back room” environment. They have no public viewable revision control system with commit access by non-Fonality employees as you see with Asterisk, FreePBX and many other Open Source projects. I’ve tried to mirror our open and transparent process by listening to the reaction and input of our community and developers prior to making this post so I could try to accurately represent this community vs. a personal spin on reality.

Fonality provided a few reasons why they have chosen to go this route as well as other comments they made in their initial and subsequent posts. Unfortunately they have made some incorrect claims and statements some of which have been factually pointed out by you in their threads. It is pointless and beneath us to get into an unproductive dispute over these assertions, nor do we have any reason to engage in a long defensive statement as Fonality felt compelled to do. The facts and transparency of our project allow anyone who cares to make their own investigations and judgments. I did engage in discussions with Fonality but in the end, it appeared their interest was to completely control this project vs. mutually beneficial relationships that may or may not have delivered their end goal of full control.

Let’s not thrash on the past, it’s more important to look towards the future and some possibly encouraging statements from the trixbox team. Having been one of the largest installed bases of FreePBX, it’s exciting, after almost 2 years, that they may finally be willing to provide input back into our project. Since Kerry joined Fonality there has been exactly one bug report correction, 2 bug reports (*) in our bug tracker that we are able to pull up based on his user name and to the best of my knowledge, there have been no other Fonality members filing bugs into the project. In their announcement Fonality has indicated they are going to finally start contributing to the FreePBX project through bug fixes and other contributions and we applaud them for that and look forward to seeing them deliver. We have one request to their team, and that is to save you, the community, from the wasted time of constantly sifting through their forked FreePBX code to find the bug fixes so you can get them back into FreePBX. This will happen, but Fonality could choose to demonstrate one of the true powers of the Open Source process: the cross pollination of related projects, by submitting those fixes into our bug tracker instead of making the community jump through hoops to achieve the same. Fonality has claimed "dual license" constraints for not doing this with Asterisk but there is no such hurdle here. Chris, we challenge you to be a responsible member of this Open Source Telephony Community by working with and not against other mutually beneficial projects.

Philippe - on behalf of the FreePBX team and community

(*) As the custom reporting section in trac has limitted ability to run reports, to assure full transparency, this report is created in trac as follows (1164009600 = Nov 20, 2006):

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