The Michigan Telephone blog

Ward Mundy offered up “Some Asterisk Resolutions for the New Year” this morning:

We made some New Year’s Resolutions for 2008… just as we do every year. There are the usual ones: lose weight, exercise, more quality time with the family. But you make all of those, too. This year, there are some changes in the Asterisk landscape we’d like to see: more community participation, better training opportunities, an end to deprecating commands, and a push into major corporate and government organizations.

Most of the points he makes in that article are very valid, but I think there’s a few that could be added to the list:

For the FreePBX folks: Open up FreePBX to more outside development. Take a break from coding (except for necessary bug fixes) and use the time to actually document how to create modules and add-ons for FreePBX, keeping in mind that some people may wish to create modules using languages other than PHP. And for crying out loud, when someone does contribute a module, don’t put it in the corner and treat it like a piece of moldy cheese. If you want a vibrant community of contributors, you cannot act like a royal priesthood that has to consider every submission as if it were a candidate for sainthood. The alternative is to have a closed system, with only a few people working on it, who will most assuredly begin to feel underloved and underappreciated. I understand that Rob Thomas may have had some valid reasons for backing away from the project, but the atmosphere seemed a lot different when he was in charge (among other things, a lot more open to outside ideas and contributed code, and he also had a much nicer documentation wiki). Oh, and please clean up the freepbx.org site and wiki (why are the documentation links on the front page incomplete?).

To the Trixbox folks: Get a thicker skin. Your sniping in various forums whenever you feel slighted is unseemly, and does not go unnoticed. In particular, people who write a personal blog or operate their own online site have no obligation whatsoever to treat you “fairly”, whatever you define that to be. If you feel that your company isn’t being represented properly, then start your own online blog or forum, or post more frequently to public forums. Some people are never going to like the fact that Fonality took over Asterisk@Home and turned it into Trixbox, and they may like you even less after the recent “phoning home” flap. Deal with it. If you feel slighted, commiserate with your peers and among your friends, but be careful about wearing your feelings on your sleeve – it just isn’t professional (just to be clear, I’ve never personally been the target of any comments that I felt were unwarranted, so this isn’t a personal thing with me – it’s just an observation based on what I’ve seen in other forums, including comment #4 on Ward’s article).

To the snobbish people who frequent the #asterisk IRC channel (you know who they are, if you frequent that channel): Stop acting so damn arrogant – just because someone is using FreePBX, or an all-in-one distribution based on Asterisk, does not mean they aren’t an Asterisk user, or that they haven’t found a valid Asterisk bug. Remember that there are alternatives to Asterisk, such as CallWeaver (formerly OpenPBX). Should the FreePBX folks ever get disgusted with being treated like third-class citizens, they may decide to move on, and that would take out a big chunk out of the Asterisk user base. Asterisk sure isn’t perfect (Ward Mundy’s comments about deprecating commands are spot on) and just because someone chooses to use a GUI rather than spend hours laboriously coding dial plans by hand doesn’t make you any better than them – you do that because you enjoy it and love the feeling of power you get, and that’s fine, but most people don’t share your love of writing code, and that does not make them inferior to you. The auto mechanic that fixes your car probably doesn’t know a damn thing about writing code, but does that make him inferior to you? I don’t think so.

To the Elastix folks: Make this year the year you release a version 1.0 (at least). Nobody takes beta versions seriously, particularly in the media. Like it or not, there’s a psychological barrier against reporting on software with a zero point something version number. And, most businesses won’t even consider installing “beta” software.

To the companies that go around installing Asterisk and FreePBX systems on a for-profit basis: If you are making money from installing Asterisk and/or FreePBX, you should be contributing something back to the developers of those products. FreePBX in particular gets the short end of the stick – a lot of people who install an all-in-one distribution just assume that FreePBX is part of that, when in reality it’s a totally separate project. If you got it free, and you’re making money off of it, and you know that continued development and support depends on the developers having some incentive to carry on, then it’s in your best interest to contribute something back. Maybe you should consider it a “tithe” of sorts – if you make a $1,000 profit on an installation, send $100 back to the FreePBX developers (and raise the price to the end-user if you feel you must – they are still getting a heck of a bargain compared to most commercial PBX systems).

And finally, to Ward Mundy: I have one small nit to pick with your article – there are a lot of “at-home” systems that have far more than five extensions, especially in large families where the kids, siblings, grandparents, etc. all have VoIP adapters. FreePBX and Asterisk make a great “family intercom” system – in some cases these are entirely closed systems with no PSTN connectivity whatsoever. So, your proposed “5-extension license” really isn’t a valid way to distinguish between home and personal systems, and systems used primarily for business use. Perhaps a better model would be a limitation on number of outside channels (trunks to VoIP providers or the PSTN) but I don’t know how you’d ever enforce that – since the code is open source, it would be a simple matter for anyone to change the limit and recompile. Maybe what needs to be done is simply to create a requirement that says, in effect, that if you install the product in a for-profit business then you are obligated to have a valid license, which costs a certain amount per group of ten trunks capable of placing calls to or receiving calls from the PSTN, directly or indirectly (trunks used for intra-company communications only, or custom trunks used to create dialing shortcuts, etc. would be excluded). Even so, a certain percentage of businesses would never comply, but by at least creating such a requirement, you put those who install and use FreePBX on notice that if they are using it in a profit-making enterprise they have a moral (and legal) obligation to pay up, without handicapping the home/family user and the experimenter.

I cannot end this article without saying that notwithstanding any comments above (which, in case it is not obvious, are simply my personal opinions), I appreciate the efforts of all the individuals who have worked so hard to give us the products mentioned in this article. Without their efforts, we would still only be able to get the capabilities of Asterisk in very expensive (and far less capable) PBX’s provided by the telephone companies, or in PBX’s manufactured by major corporations that have price tags higher than that of a new car (and that’s for a very low-end system). The fact that you can take an all-in-one distribution, burn it to a CD, put that CD in an older computer and an hour later (or less) have a fully functioning PBX system, with capabilities only dreamed about just a decade ago, is nothing short of astounding to me! So I applaud all those who have made that possible, and I hope the new year will see further development and better documentation, by those folks and by newcomers to the world of Asterisk and FreePBX.