The Hall Family » Freeside

MySQL Me Harder

Jayce — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:37:13 +0000

Yes, this was the announcement title from Ivan today as he pushed out the door the return of MySQL support in Freeside. Now all those people who have hesitated to try out freeside from lack of PostgreSQL experience, or simply wanting unification in their MySQL infrastructure can get started. The notes for installation from Ivan are:

You’ll need DBIx::DBSchema 0.35 from CPAN or

http://www.sisd.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/DBIx-DBSchema.tar.gz?view=tar

and FREESIDE_1_7_BRANCH (or HEAD):

http://www.sisd.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/freeside.tar.gz?view=tar&pathrev=FREESIDE_1_7_BRANCH

Astricon So Far

Jayce — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:53:15 +0000

Two days of working the floor at Astricon, and ‘m already tired. I’m definitely not used to talking quite so much. I’ve been very happy with the reception we’ve had with the Asterisk community though.

Coming into the conference, Ivan and I figured we’d be able to have some good discussions with people looking at ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Providers), as we have a package that fills their needs far better than other open source solutions. Heck, we beat out proprietary ones too . What has been nice though is to really get a feel for the needs of other markets, such as call centers and larger enterprises. We’ve found we can already fulfill a large part of their needs also, and can quickly extend to provide even more capabilities that no other products are fulfilling. Many of these groups are realizing that they need to perform internal “billing”, accounting for departmental expenditures, or track individual callers usage. Freeside’s provisioning system makes it much easier for many groups to setup users, manage inventory, and automate rollout procedures.

Many people are really seeing a future of Freeside powering a lot of their Asterisk process, and we couldn’t be happier. Now we need to get more documentation on how to do it up on the wiki :-/

Last Minute Asterisk

Jayce — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 22:35:22 +0000

As a last minute trip, I’ll be heading out Wednesday to Astricon to assist Ivan in presenting Freeside to the Asterisk community. Hopefully we’ll be able to help a lot of people and companies understand how their billing needs are already met with open source.

Oh, and the hackathon time will be really nice too. Thanks to jsmith and sisd for helping me out with the trip. If you want to learn about how to bill, or even account for Asterisk calls with open source, look us up, we’ll be featured in the Open Source Showcase.

Come See My Presentation

Jayce — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:19:05 +0000

Hopefully this is a logo you’ll see a lot of soon, Come check out all of us presenting at the UTOS conference. Just contact me, or another LUG or business group leader for your discount code (only $40 for everything). Well worth the admission, and it goes directly towards helping your local Open Source groups and projects.

For anybody interested in billing for an ISP or ASP situation, come check out my presentation on Advanced Billing in Freeside.

Freeside Licensing Change

Jayce — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:09:38 +0000

Received in the Freeside devel and users list today, Ivan announced an upcoming license change for the Freeside package, Going from GPL v2 to AGPL v3.

The purpose of the move is to limit the “webapp loophole”, where you could sell access to a modified version of a GPL product, but not distribute the changes. As Ivan put it:

“I want Freeside to be free for everyone to use and modify, but I don’t
feel it is equitable to our community for large companies to fork
private versions of the software and sell access to them in a
hosted/SaaS/ASP capacity to avoid having to make the source code of
their derivitive works available. This seems to violate the spirit of
the GPL and copyleft, if not the letter (hence why it is called a
“loophole”).”

The purpose of this is not to block customized code, but only selling out usage of non-contributed code. This will not prevent the development of custom plugins, which the Freeside architecture encourages, but only selling hosted access to those.

Interested parties are invited to particpate in the AGPL draft discussion: http://gplv3.fsf.org/agplv3-dd1-guide.html