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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."
Am I the only one who saw this headline and wondered just who either of these companies were?
/. headline involve at least one company I've *heard* of...
Usually, company acquisitions worthy of a
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.
They have put together a vertical Linux distribution dedicated to telephony.
As opposed to a horizontal linux distribution dedicated to telephony? As opposed to a diagonal distribution? A vertical distribution that is dedicated to something other than telephony?
The sentence up there is composed as if it conveyed some kind of information, but that may be misleading...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
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.
BINGO!
... what would we do without it?
Oh thank goodness it's integrated into the SugarCRM
Yikes. I've seen some lousy summaries, but this is buzzword bingo at its best (worst?).
My employer is a Fonality reseller and we do well selling them to small businesses. I have been bugging them for a year to integrate with sugarcrm since crm and a directory is a shortcoming of asterisk but something asterisk @ home made easy with cisco 7960 type phones. This a great event for small companies that cant afford a $100,000 cisco call manager, believe me.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
The big deal isn't Trixbox. The big deal is Asterisk. It's like someone bought Slackware because it has Apache. OK so I exaggerate a bit but it's not obvious to me that Trixbox makes Asterisk a lot easier to deal with.
I'm the lead deveoper for freePBX, 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 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 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
Schlock Mercenary.
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.
It's not my website so I can't argue with what gets posted to the front page but this has to goes in my who gives a shit news pile. I'll have to agree with the OP in that W=WHO would apply also. I am sure we'll get dozens of posts from people who know everything about the project down to the MD5 hash of each file, but I bet you could fill a ton of backend MySQL databases with the number of people who haven't heard of them.
but without sounding tooooo much of the type, I must say this is great news for the fledgling industry I call home. I'm still surprised how young this is, and how little the world seems to know about it. Get in now, spend the years mastering it, and you will retire very rich, trust me :)
Trixbox is for Kids!
(Sorry couldn't resist).
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
As the title says. Read the Trixbox review: http://oldskoolphreak.com/tfiles/voip/asterisk_vs_ trixbox.txt
When will Asterisk build a distributed system that is easier to scale or is its sole purpose now small to media sized businesses?
http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=148 (Too lazy to do a proper link tonight).
Are you seriously looking at this or just looking to flame? The real story is that software we can download (either Trixbox or just CentOS, Asterisk and FreePBX) and install on a standard PC that will function better then $100,000.00+ system from Nortel that costs maybe $5000.00 plus phones. At my day job we have a $600,000.00 Nortel with about another 150K of hardware in the system. It is going to be replaced with an Asterisk based system over the next few years. Maybe a Fonality Box or a Digium Appliance? Possibly one of those with something of my own making attached via IAX2 trunking. At any rate it will be a system that rivals the current offerings by just about everyone. At a much lower cost.
Not to mention the sheer geekiness of Trixbox. It makes a killer home hack. You can control X10 from your phone. Tie your doorbell in as an extension and answer the door with your phone using hardware from home base. On and on.
On my home business, if I don't answer, the user gets the option of trying my cell phone or go to voice mail. If I don't answer the cell then Trixbox takes over and goes to internal voicemail which is then emailed to me. Makes the cell phone usable without giving anyone my cell number.
Thing is that we all use phones and there is a major shift underway with regards to what with and how we use voice communications. Very exiting on a lot of levels.
Robert
I work for a large VoIP SP and I can say that Trixbox isn't the LAMP stack of the Telephony market (at least yet).
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
"MySQL's Brian Aker has..."
Hey wassup Brain Ache!
I bet he heard that in the playground...
They say sarchasm is the lowest for of wit, I think we need to recount the vote because 'making fun of names' should be elected #1.
What about hardware?
Sure I can get Asterisk and whatnot for free, but you still need the hardware to run it on, and I have been unable to find info anywhere on how to build a cheap PBX. I look at the hardware that you can plug into a PCI slot (sold by the vendor that makes Asterisk), and the prices are so high that when all is said and done, I might as well just buy an actual commercial phone switch.
How does one going about making a cheap PBX that has a few external POTS lines, and a half dozen or so internal lines?
Well, see, with a vertical distribution, you get enough CDs to stack them up against each other and not have them fall down.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I have been told that there are certain softmodems -- ones that use a particular Intel chipset -- that you can find for under $10 that will work under Asterix in place of the proprietary cards. I think it's the Intel 537 series chipsets that are the key. Since all they do is bridge the phone line to the computer, they can be used for voice or data given appropriate software. Given how few modems I've seen in stores lately, eBay may be your friend.
Might want to see this article:
A $10 Linux Answering Machine
Now that would mean basically one line, either to the telco PSTN system or to an extension, per PCI slot, which unless you had some abnormally large mobo is probably not too great. However, you could load up the PCI slots with them, use them all for the outgoing lines (to the telco) and then do your internal extensions over VOIP. That would also have the advantage of not having to run analog phone lines throughout the office; everything is just on your data network provided it can handle the load. Might be a bit of cash though, if you don't have VoIP phones already.
Also, there is hardware besides Digium's which is compatible with Asterisk, see this list for an overview of vendors.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Stay away from Trixbox. It has the same problems as A@H.. The developers promised us to be able to upgrade, but it still requires you to wipe your system to upgrade.. Not very userfriendly at all! You spend a lot of time configuring, and then a new version comes out, you hit some bug in the version you are using and ask on the mailing list.. And get the answer back "Upgrade, thats an old version". And there you go, doing the same million configuration changes again..