As some of you know, for a PBX system at RustyBrick, I use an open source platform named Asterisk, supported by Fonality.
This morning, most incoming and outgoing calls stopped working. We tried rebooting the server and it had some major disk failures. Here is a picture of the box running Fedora, recovering from the disk failures all on its own:
Several minutes later, the system appeared to recover. The picture here is a picture of Fonality loaded up on a Dell box - pretty cool, ehh...
Anyway, it recovered by the phone calls did not work. So I called Fonality support, something I rarely do, and pressed the emergency number. Shortly after, I got someone on the call who took care of the issue. He quickly figured out it was an issue with the caller id handler, it was an unsupported version. So he pushed down a supported version and we were back on track to placing and accepting phone calls.
This is the exact reason I wanted a supported solution. Going with Fonality allows me to support open source and also get support for my system.
I've written about Fonality in the past. I did a Features in 4.0 review as well as a full Fonality review in the past. I am still a happy Fonality user, even after 2.5 years.
Comments
"Going with Fonality allows me to support open source and also get support for my system."
Well, that sounds nice. Unfortunately, Fonality has _never_ contributed anything to the Asterisk project. So, supporting Fonality is not support Asterisk at all.
Posted by: Some Guy | June 14, 2008 11:30 AM
Incorrect. Fonality contributes 100% of its Asterisk changes back to the community by including our source code on every PBXtra system and in every download of our trixbox Pro software. This is fully compliant with the spirit and letter of the GPL, and always has been.
What we do *not* do, is sign Digium's commercial waiver, allowing them to sell our code under a non-GPL license to our competitors. We feel their commerical license is against the spirit of open source and contrary to the GPL spirit of Asterisk.
Unfortunately, because Digium controls the repository of Asterisk, they choose not to allow your code into the GPL version of Asterisk if you have not signed their commercial waiver. Effectively they are holding the open community hostage to those that don't bend to their proprietary commercial pursuits.
Because Digium controls what goes into Asterisk by way of their commercial license, we elect to contribue our code to the trixbox community which is 100% open source and not encumbered by the complexities and pressures of Digium's commercial Asterisk license.
Dan Rosenthal
EVP, Fonality Inc.
Posted by: Dan | June 23, 2008 6:29 PM