WhyThisFork

I immediately loved the concept of architectural simplicity that motivated the AskoziaPBX project.

The key concepts, which I also intend to continue to pursue, are:

• Minimal and lightweight unix like OS that includes only services essential to the PBX.
• Fast system recovery or hardware swap.
• Core pbx software secured on a read-only file system.
• Simple and intuitive user interface.

I like that. Since we had some common goals I have supported, promoted and contributed happily to the project.

But like all good fairy tales, at some point something went wrong. Askozia was derived from M0n0wall and was initially released under a BSD license, this essentially means that you can do whatever you want... I would say that is too much from my point of view!
So I started to contribute to the project, sharing ideas, code, debugging. Although the BSD license has not forced me to share anything, I thought it was right to do so in the spirit of growing together.

#1 License issues

Unfortunately at the end of April 2010, the AskoziaPBX team added a third clause to the BSD license that prevents commercial redistribution of this software.

3. Redistribution in any form at a charge, that in whole or in part
contains or is derived from the software, including but not limited to
value added products, is prohibited without prior written consent of
tecema (a.k.a IKT).

I'm not worried so much but I continued for a long time wondering about the real implications of this clause. As an installer or as a consultant it should not worry me so much, however this clause limits my freedom and prevents me from making something different in the future. In fact, the worse was yet to come.
In June 2011 AskoziaPBX 2.1 was released, has not been a good surprise: a hybrid built from the core open source with proprietary code sold at a very affordable price. The bad surprise is not the price but the fact that I can not change it, still could contribute code, then when it will be released ... I have to pay to use it. Sounds a little bizarre, no?.

The reasons set out above by themselves are sufficient to start a fork freeing me from all the ties introduced after the clause added to the original license (starting from svn changeset 1515). This will force me to get rid also of most (if not all) of the new code. Nothing tragic, see #2.

#2 Different goals.

Simplicity has been always one of the strengths behind AskoziaPBX, unfortunately, this sometimes happens even at the expense of functionality. I'm not talking about some esoteric features, but the basic phone switch functionality set that are present in any legacy PBX. Bridging this gap is one of the key objectives.

Also I'd like to move focus a bit more near to SMB target applications.

In addition, the Askozia code has become redundant, difficult to "read" and maintain, perhaps because some very old piece and the new code still live without being truly integrated or updated.
I think it's a good challenge to ride.

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Finally, someone might ask, why do this huge work for free?

1. I learned a lot thanks to the open source software, I want to share and give something back to the community.
2. I do not want to sell this software but please learn to distinguish: open source and free are not the same thing.

You can have this software for free, you can not have consultancy, custom coding or services for free.
Nothing prevents me from providing services or sell other software that works together with TeeBX to solve specific applications requirements.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: shaw...@gmail.com

Thank you for your work.. I'm a big fun of m0n0wall and asterisk.. I can't wait to play with your TeeBX..

David KE6UPI