Beware of the TrixBox: Redux
Many were vehemently opposed to the story, pointing out that Mercian's problems were configuration issues and nothing to do with the TrixBox per se. Others thought that the problems Mercian faced exemplified the challenges posed by open source software.
Andrew Gillis, a founder of TrixBox, e-mailed me the following:
I read your recent blog post on trixbox. I think it is unfairly negative. Open source software is free but it should still be installedby people who understand it. Also the people who use it must be trained in its operation. If you had paid a company like Nortel to install a phone system they would have trained your users on how to use it and configured it to work with your network.
That being said there are hundreds of thousands of users worldwide who use trixbox and have none of the problems you listed even though they installed it themselves. I like to think of open source as extreme capitalism. Because there is no cost only the best and easiest software is used. This is probably why so many people use trixbox and why it is so popular.
As for HUD it is designed to be used with a hard phone or a soft phone and integrates very nicely with both of them. It works well with a mobile phone as well. I was in an airport the other day using hud with my cell phone. I clicked on a member of my team. My cell phone rang and I was talking to him. If I only had a soft phone this would not have worked because the wireless broadband I was using is too slow to carry VoIP. The point of HUD is it decouples the voice from the control of the phone system and you can use any device even a pay phone as the voice connection. I can be completely productive in an airport just as if I was in the office. This is the power of HUD.
At the same time, a poster pointed out that TrixBox has become more difficult to work with over the years.
Trixbox? Set it up right! Or pay them to configure it. Fonality took Trixbox and morphed it into a different beast from a couple of years ago. It is a bit less user freindly and more canned. I have had to circle back through apps to tweak them properly, but my install is performing great. A dozen or so SIP phones, a pots interface, and over 125 extensions. All on a measly Road Runner connection that can burst up to 7 meg. Other peers I know that have grown up with the original open source Trixbox mostly have migrated to pbxinaflash since Fonality commercialized it. If you build it, they will call.
Those criticial of open source thought that Mercian Label's saga was indicative of the kinds of problems organizations face when they deal with open source software.
"LOL How ironic," wrote croberts,"Isn't that the open source mantra? Everyone can do it themselves! Sally Secretary can recompile the Wordprocessor during lunch break if she doesn't like the way it works!
Seriously, this exactly show the tug of war between open source and a pre-packaged commercial solution that is often proprietary(but doesn't have to be).
You want the 10 billion dollar corporation to have done the testing for you... not screw around with telephones for two weeks.
Another poster, frgough, concurred:
Don't be too hard on him. Open Source zealots continually proclaim that open source will save you tons of money, and so he bought into the shtick and tried to do it on the cheap.
So should TrixBox as a community focus more on deliveing the sort of slick instalaltion and configuration that one finds in commercial sofware than on functionality? I'd be interested to hear what you think.