In January of 2015, the FreePBX project became part of the Sangoma family. Being a commercial entity charged with maintaining an open source project can be a challenging endeavor at times. Furthermore, the fact that major open source projects are normally in the care of commercial organizations is usually not given much thought.
Before Sangoma, FreePBX was overseen by Schmooze Com Inc., before that Bandwidth and before that Coalescent Systems Inc. These companies have all done their parts to ensure the survival of the FreePBX project. Sangoma has been dedicated to the open source community, including FreePBX, for many years. In the last year, the FreePBX project has seen great strides, including the release of FreePBX 13 with accelerated development and bug fixes.
Sangoma has also empowered FreePBX with new open source features such as: synchronizing Active Directory with user manager, a complete rewrite of Sound Recordings, the overhaul of the FreePBX interface, playback of recordings in your browser, the addition of the firewall module, sound languages module and so much more.
More recently they have kicked off development on FreePBX 14, Their next major release. One of the major new open sourced features they are bringing to the table is a calendaring system which will become a replacement for many of the scheduling components you use today, like Time Conditions. But They’ll be able to talk more about that in a few weeks.
FreePBX has historically been funded through professional training, professional support services, and commercial modules. These commercial modules tend to enhance the already provided open source functionality. These modules usually require special development or maintenance considerations, so they become paid modules. Over time, they constantly review our collection of commercial modules to see if any meet the requirements to become open sourced.
Thus, they have decided to release several of these commercial modules under the AGPLv3 as open sourced. Some of these modules have been unmaintained for a few years and will be put into the contributed repository to allow community members to build off of the code and revive or enhance the functions for the open source community.
They have also thrown in a few actively maintained modules such as XMPP, RESTapi and Text-To-Speech Engines that will allow broader use and community contributions. Moving forward these modules will still be maintained by Sangoma. In the coming months, They hope to have some great new features regarding RESTapi.
It is hoped that the release of this code will inspire users to take FreePBX to the next level!
