Fonality Acquires Trixbox

An anonymous reader writes "MySQL's Brian Aker has a good commentary on the big news in acquisitions today that Fonality has acquired Trixbox, the Linux Telephony distribution." From the article: "So why is this big news? Trixbox is the distribution for telephony on Linux today. They have put together a vertical Linux distribution dedicated to telephony. It combines Asterisk with a web based interface backed by MySQL, integrated into the SugarCRM solution. As Redhat today is the LAMP of the IT Enterprise and Web Framework, (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP), Trixbox is the LAMP stack of the Telephony market, Linux , Asterisk, MySQL, Perl/PHP."

LAMP buzzword

[m0rph3us0]

The whole article reads like a press release. I really like the integration of the epic struggle between Linux and Microsoft. Telephony isn't Microsoft's market. The big company that Trixbox / Asterisk is competing against are PBX vendors like Avaya or NEC. Or long distance telcos to a lesser extent as well as more directly against Cisco.

This is a good thing

[WillRobinson]

Trixbox is the renamed Asterisk@home project. Which is a complete open source PBX. Andrew had maintained the whole thing for a long time, and its good that a commercial company who is in this end of the business, is providing support via money / extra hands. Hopefully another good example of the FOSS way.

FreePBX

[Rob from RPI]

I'm the lead deveoper for freePBX [freepbx.org], which is the GUI for Asterisk that Trixbox uses, and I was a bit surprised by this announcement. The CEO of Fonality has clarified things a bit in a comment to my original post [freepbx.org] when I first heard about this. The linked blog entry is pretty much incorrect, from what I can see. I've also posted on the trixbox forums [trixbox.org] and Chris also explained a bit more there about what's going on.

However, FreePBX _is still free_ - It hasn't been bought, it's still pure Open Source, and it's not forking to a non-free addition, so don't panic. Trixbox is just a wrapper for asterisk and freepbx (and, obviously, a couple of other things), and Fonality have bought the wrapper, not the package.

I'll leave to to your previously scheduled conspiracy theories now.

--Rob

Re:This is a good thing

[huckda]

have you seen Fonality's products?
nothing special to speak of...
As a matter of fact I chose Asterisk@Home over them for a number of reasons...
the way they base their support...the COST of that support(simply for software updates)...lack of support(financially) for those doing the actual footwork/installations onsite(bill your own hours, but once you've set it up...we'll take all of the support money thanks)

Their software that they have developed is nice...but will they let you just buy the software, NO..you have to buy a crappy server you could build at 1/3 of the cost.

software-wise this might be a good thing...enterprise-wise if they don't keep Trixbox FOSS...it is going to suck big-time.

This got the front page?

[noahisaac]

I'm an asterisk admin and user, and I try to stay active on the asterisk user mailing list. I know who both Fonality and Trixbox are, and I had to wonder why this made the front page of slashdot.

I guess it is important, though, because trixbox is an open source project, and the trixbox developers are now going to be paid to develop it. Fonality will reap the rewards when they install it for their clients. It's a good example of how an open source business can work.

Nerd Vittles has a great TrixBox distro.

[rindeee]

http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=148 [nerdvittles.com] (Too lazy to do a proper link tonight).