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Fonality Acquires Trixbox

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the i-love-lamp dept.

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."

12 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. WTF? (W == "Who") by mad.frog · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Am I the only one who saw this headline and wondered just who either of these companies were?

    Usually, company acquisitions worthy of a /. headline involve at least one company I've *heard* of...

    1. Re:WTF? (W == "Who") by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Funny
      Get your head out of your ass Looser!

      Well, if his head was indeed up his ass, I'd say it's looser than the average rectum...

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:WTF? (W == "Who") by Dorkmunder · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Trixbox was the next iteration of the Asterisk@Home ISO which is a fantastic, super easy to install instant PBX for home or work. For a $30 dollar special modem card (an FXO) and a slightly old PC, you can quickly have a full fledged PBX system up and running in about 20 minutes. It has all the modules you could need to do even fancy PBX configurations built in. This is a huge deal. This is something that could finally get those scam artists at places like Avaya to stop charging exorbitant prices for 30 year old technology (not to mention the yearly licensing etc). This set of tools could save a company tons and tons of money by helping them move to a much more inexpensive solution. If you are interested in OSS and phones you should learn more

    3. Re:WTF? (W == "Who") by Riktov · · Score: 2, Funny

      >>>They are big players in the asterisk market.

      As in, "who the f*** are these companies??"

  2. LAMP buzzword by m0rph3us0 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  3. This is a good thing by WillRobinson · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:This is a good thing by huckda · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      "Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
  4. FreePBX by Rob+from+RPI · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:FreePBX by jedaustin · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm not sure the Fonality acquisition is a good or bad thing.
      I'm hoping they'll put some funds and people towards working out the bugs rather than adding more features.

      I really like asterisk and AMP/FreePBX make it easy to manage. If I could fix a few issues such as low volume on bridged zaptel calls, timeouts that don't work for custom extensions (such as to my cell phone) that cause unanswered calls to go to my cell phone's voicemail instead of asterisk's, and an annoying dtmf issue where extensions that are typed in aren't always recognized (related to rx/txgain I think) I'd start deploying it for my customers.

      Great job with FreePBX. It's an outstanding piece of work!

      JD

  5. This got the front page? by noahisaac · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Nerd Vittles has a great TrixBox distro. by rindeee · · Score: 2, Informative

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

  7. Take a look a bit deeper. by ubercombatwombat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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