Serious Question

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

Ok, I have a bad taste in my mouth right now from the Telephone system I have right now. FreePBX seems to be going very commercial and a lot of the modules within the system are being removed and replaced with Commercial modules.

With that out of the way and please don’t get me wrong, I like to support a developer but when something is called “Free” you expect not to buy the modules. So my questions is this… Should I make the move over to Asterisk? I used to run it a long time ago, but for some reason ended up using PaidPBX.

I am not a tight-ass, but I kind of got annoyed when the Commercial side of “FreePBX” started to do so called upgrades to “FREE” modules to break your existing modules and to force you to “PAY” for it. Does that make sense?

So please, talk to me and explain if the move is justified? I like the look of Asterisk and as I said, used it many years ago and liked it then. Now I am looking for a reason to move back and do a clean install.

I use the system for my home with my Cisco phones with 10 Extensions, I have time restrictions in place for my inbound routes and so on… I can’t compare the two systems but it would seem from what I can tell, there is a lot of improvements to Asterisk since my last use.

I am also looking for a way to support the system, I used SipStation which helped support my “FreePBX” system and will be looking for an alternative to SipStation if anyone can help there.

Any help would be appreciated, sorry if this seems a bit out of place or if I seem a little on edge, I am right now so my apologies up front.

2

I’m not familiar with the politics of FreePBX, but this doesn’t make sense because Asterisk and FreePBX are not competing products. FreePBX is an add on to Asterisk that provides a web based GUI for moves and changes. There is a competing product, called FreeSwitch.

If you do mean FreePBX, the only real complaint you might have is with the continued use of “Free”, although abuse of Free and Open by marketing departments is very common.

Unless you are prepared to maintain your own fork of the open source products, you will always be vulnerable to needs of companies like Digium to have a workable business model. As less people use PCI cards, they may have to concentrate more on the market that wants “easy to use” configuration, and, at some point, selling appliances and supported software may not be enough for them.

With regard to the Asterisk core, some things, like G.729 and Skype, cannot be offered free of charge, because their intellectual property owners dictate otherwise.

Also, subjects should summarise the article, not state the seriousness of the question. “Serious Question” would cover even more threads than “Help”, as far as their authors were concerned.

3

Hi

I think you need to explain what modules you are referring to ? as In a standard Freepbx install i don’t see any modules are are chargeable !