We have always joked about the possibility that a company would buy Digium and with it, the rights and control of its most important application: Asterisk. Today, that joke has become a reality as Sangoma has purchased Digium for an amount similar to its annual revenue in 2017: 28 million dollars, a negligible sum considering that Digium owns the rights to the most well-known open-source communications software of all time.
Digium and Sangoma have always been major competitors since both companies developed hardware for communications and although Sangoma has always had considerably more experience, the union of Digium with Asterisk made its cards work better and more easily than any other with this software, which made Digium grow rapidly and shield itself from purchases by other companies.
Currently, the sale of hardware and cards has plummeted, mainly due to the use of SIP providers, cloud hosting, and the use of gateways, phones, and SIP softphones, so Digium continued to look for new hardware that would allow it to continue growing, although there it found much more competition and although with Digium phones they tried to have some exclusivity and advantage over other manufacturers, the high price and some errors in the management of these features made many users prefer other alternative brands instead of Digium’s hardware.
The fact that Asterisk was independent of Digium allowed it to continue advancing without the “commercial” shadow that would force it to have exclusive commercial features and plugins and many of the nonsenses that would make a user choose another solution different from Asterisk. However, and seeing the changes that FreePBX has had since it was free software until now, surely (and this is a personal opinion) Asterisk will start to incorporate new commercial features exploitable only by Sangoma while the exploitation of this software in commercial systems is prohibited or they are forced to pay licenses for it.
This is, without a doubt, the most relevant news of recent years, news that devastates us inside, in the same way that when 3CX bought Elastix to destroy it. Sangoma is smarter than 3CX and we all know that it will not destroy Asterisk, at least not as quickly as 3CX destroyed Elastix. Sangoma will force changes. Digium allowed completely independent management of Asterisk, assigning a “leader” of the project (Kevin P. Flemming, Russell Bryant, Matt Frederikson, and many others) something that, according to Digium will continue as until now… although something makes me suspect that it will not be exactly the same.
According to a page they have just published with possible questions and answers about the future of Asterisk in the hands of Sangoma, everything will continue as usual, but those of us who follow the developers of Asterisk and many Digium workers know that when they start to change companies, it will be the time when Sangoma will start to have its way.
It is still early and no one wants to hear about a possible “fork” of Asterisk, although I fear that while the purchase of Elastix gave rise to Issabel, the purchase of Digium (and Asterisk) will surely lead to something new and more exciting than the possible software in the hands of a company like Sangoma.
Goodbye to Digium phones, goodbye to Digium gateways, goodbye to Switchvox, cards, and any Digium hardware material… Digium will start selling Sangoma hardware and really the purchase was for Asterisk, its community, and the rights of this software. Rights that will make the integration of Asterisk with any other software or hardware, interaction with its APIs or create new products… goodbye to the freedom to have free software for whatever we can think of inventing.
Instead, we will have software integrated with a web (FreePBX) that will make integration with any other management web practically impossible (although technically it would be complicated, perhaps legally they could achieve it) and with less guarantee of compatibility with anything that is not Sangoma. A pity.
I don’t want to say goodbye Asterisk, because I will still work quite a bit with this software, but surely it wouldn’t be a bad time to start looking for alternatives that cannot be bought.
Via SinoLogic (Elio Riojano Martínez) [See original post]
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