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To be honest, the conclusion of the blog post that Freeswitch are not budging from their community release schedule does not surpise me one iota. Freeswitch us

To be honest, the conclusion of the blog post that Freeswitch are not budging from their community release schedule does not surpise me one iota. Freeswitch used to have a strong community spirit. Things all changed since they took a more agressive commercial turn, a couple of years ago IIRC. Since that point you now have to jump through the "register" hoop to gain access to stuff that should be open (I can't remember what it is, IIRC something like the APT repos being hidden behind a "register" wall, something like that). I don't want to "register" with a commercial company to gain access to the foss community content. Because we all know what happens in the tech world if you give your details to a commercial company, the salesdroids start pestering you for an upsell/cross-sell, you get put in mailing lists you never asked to be put on, etc.

BEBAA7 2y ago
In Signalwire’s defence, reading through the old mailing list, I got the feeling they drove the development of Freeswitch for years without being properly compensated by downstream projects. Sadly I’ve also seen other parts of the Voip community recalibrate their generosity when it comes to open source and I honestly can’t blame them. The team behind Matrix.org talked about a similar problem in one of their FOSDEM’25 talks: commercial vendors free loading on development.
- knowitnone 2y ago
  It's MPL licensed. Perhaps they should have chosen a different license if they want to be compensated.
  - traceroute66 2y ago
    > It's MPL licensed. Perhaps they should have chosen a different license if they want to be compensated. Or indeed if they wanted to be compensated, they could have moved to an open-core model. It was their decision for many years to keep the majority of the project as foss. IIRC there were only ever two commercial optional licenses, one for the G.729 codec and one for something else. Everything elee was foss. They could have sold licenses for this that and everything else, but it was their decision and theirs alone not to.
jeroenhd 2y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the patched source code available? It'd be awfully nice of them to update their APT repos for free, but that's nothing more than that: awfully nice. If you rely on their code and don't wish to pay for their support, you could always build the APT packages yourself. I don't know what kind of community spirit you should expect for a project maintained by a single company like this.
- traceroute66 2y ago
  > It'd be awfully nice of them to update their APT repos for free, but that's nothing more than that: awfully nice. It doesn't cost them anything metophorically or physically. Updating the APT repo is a CI/CD script away. No doubt they do it for the commercial side anyway, so the tweak in the CI/CD is probably no more than a couple of variables. And open-source projects can usually get freebies from everything they need. So there's unlikely to be much if anything in terms of actual hard-dollars expense for running the repos.

BEBAA7 2y ago

In Signalwire’s defence, reading through the old mailing list, I got the feeling they drove the development of Freeswitch for years without being properly compensated by downstream projects. Sadly I’ve also seen other parts of the Voip community recalibrate their generosity when it comes to open source and I honestly can’t blame them. The team behind Matrix.org talked about a similar problem in one of their FOSDEM’25 talks: commercial vendors free loading on development.

knowitnone 2y ago
It's MPL licensed. Perhaps they should have chosen a different license if they want to be compensated.
- traceroute66 2y ago
  > It's MPL licensed. Perhaps they should have chosen a different license if they want to be compensated. Or indeed if they wanted to be compensated, they could have moved to an open-core model. It was their decision for many years to keep the majority of the project as foss. IIRC there were only ever two commercial optional licenses, one for the G.729 codec and one for something else. Everything elee was foss. They could have sold licenses for this that and everything else, but it was their decision and theirs alone not to.

jeroenhd 2y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the patched source code available? It'd be awfully nice of them to update their APT repos for free, but that's nothing more than that: awfully nice. If you rely on their code and don't wish to pay for their support, you could always build the APT packages yourself. I don't know what kind of community spirit you should expect for a project maintained by a single company like this.

traceroute66 2y ago
> It'd be awfully nice of them to update their APT repos for free, but that's nothing more than that: awfully nice. It doesn't cost them anything metophorically or physically. Updating the APT repo is a CI/CD script away. No doubt they do it for the commercial side anyway, so the tweak in the CI/CD is probably no more than a couple of variables. And open-source projects can usually get freebies from everything they need. So there's unlikely to be much if anything in terms of actual hard-dollars expense for running the repos.