Asterisk friend FreePBX joins with Bandwidth.com

Bandwidth.com is playing parent to the open-source project FreePBX, hiring the project's developer as its Open Source Community Developer and apparently committing "significant resources and effort" to expand the scope of the project.

An informal announcement of Bandwidth.com's commitment to FreePBX came through chief developer Philippe Lindheimer's blog at www.freepbx.org on November 14 in a post entitled "A Bright Future for FreePBX." Lindheimer said he had "joined forces" with Bandwidth.Com as its Open Source Community Director and indicated both he and Bandwidth.com would work to expand the scope of FreePBX and to assure it remains "open and strong."

Lindheimer cited Bandwidth.com's efforts in purchasing the FreePBX trademark and its efforts with FreeSwitch as areas where the company has been helpful to the open source community. Since Bandwidth.com sells VoIP and data services - not software - there's no fundamental conflict of interest. Instead, FreePBX likely would act in a complementary role in promoting the Bandwidth.com services such as SIP trunking.

This is the latest coup for FreePBX; the web-based GUI provides pre-programmed functionality and ease of use on top of Asterisk, including features such as "follow me," ring groups with calls confirmation, music on hold, unlimited conferencing, and paging and intercom functionality for many SIP phones. Digium incorporated FreePBX into its compilation of the AsteriskNow 1.5 turnkey release in October.

For more:
- FreePBX blog posting praising Bandwidth.com investment.

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