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Fonality Acquires Trixbox

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Oct 04, 2006 05:14 PM
from the i-love-lamp dept.
Communications Linux
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."

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[+] Ask Slashdot: Which Asterisk Or Other VoIP System To Deploy? 91 comments
ubercombatwombat is looking for a bit of advice: "On the 9th of November, I have a meeting to discuss an Asterisk based phone system for a new elementary school. I am the network admin for the district. Currently, we are migrating from a T-1 based Nortel (option 61, 2 x option 11 and 7 x Norstar 8x32's, for those who care) to 1GB data fiber and a 2nd pair per site — to allow simple copper-to-fiber for the split T-1/Norstar's. We also just got a 10MB (scalable to 100MB) connect to the Internet. I can keep the VoIP basically on a separate network if need be as well. What do I install? Are there Asterisk vendors that are available and have enough experience?"
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  • WTF? (W == "Who") (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mad.frog (525085) <steven&crinklink,com> on Wednesday October 04 2006, @05:18PM (#16312965)
    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...

  • LAMP buzzword (Score:3, Informative)

    by m0rph3us0 (549631) on Wednesday October 04 2006, @05:21PM (#16313017)
    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.

  • vertical distribution? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Iron Condor (964856) on Wednesday October 04 2006, @05:25PM (#16313083)

    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...

  • This is a good thing (Score:4, Informative)

    by WillRobinson (159226) on Wednesday October 04 2006, @05:27PM (#16313125)
    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.

  • fonality (Score:2)

    by mytrip (940886) on Wednesday October 04 2006, @05:45PM (#16313383) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • FreePBX (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rob from RPI (4309) <xrobau@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 04 2006, @05:50PM (#16313447) Homepage
    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

  • This got the front page? (Score:3, Informative)

    by noahisaac (956470) on Wednesday October 04 2006, @05:54PM (#16313517) Homepage
    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.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • Agree with the WTF (Score:1)

    by madsheep (984404) on Wednesday October 04 2006, @05:55PM (#16313529) Homepage
    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.

  • Fan boy here... (Score:1)

    by Super Dave Osbourne (688888) on Wednesday October 04 2006, @05:58PM (#16313565)
    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 :)

  • Silly Wabbit (Score:1, Redundant)

    by EQ (28372) on Wednesday October 04 2006, @06:13PM (#16313751) Journal
    Trixbox is for Kids!

    (Sorry couldn't resist).
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • When will Asterisk build a distributed system that is easier to scale or is its sole purpose now small to media sized businesses?

  • Nerd Vittles has a great TrixBox distro. (Score:3, Informative)

    by rindeee (530084) on Wednesday October 04 2006, @08:06PM (#16315135)
    http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=148 [nerdvittles.com] (Too lazy to do a proper link tonight).

  • Take a look a bit deeper. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ubercombatwombat (803501) on Wednesday October 04 2006, @08:26PM (#16315329) Homepage
    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

  • IAAVD (Score:2)

    by zobier (585066) <zobierNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Wednesday October 04 2006, @09:14PM (#16315797) Homepage
    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).

  • Tee Hee (Score:1)

    by dintech (998802) on Thursday October 05 2006, @08:27AM (#16320093)
    "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.
  • 9 replies beneath your current threshold.

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