My name is Darren and I'm the lead developer on the FreePBX 3 project. Thanks for taking the time to share your comments on our new project.

To be clear, the new FreePBX 3 is an alpha/developer release. It is not a replacement, by any means, for FreePBX 2.6 (yet).

I want to clarify something right off that bat in regard to this comment:
"I am a bit reluctant to jump up in joy and happiness. In my experience, when software becomes agnostic, it loose edge. In reality we are now going to have a GUI with the common lowest denominator, instead of having a GUI that is tailored 110% for a given architecture."

Please be aware that this was our concern, too! We have taken great strides to ensure that we are not 'dumbing down' anyone's ability to utilize switch features. We did this by building very, very granular modules with very little in the core of the system. This makes almost everything replaceable. Nothing stops you from loading switch-specific modules.

I agree that programs which try to offer the SAME functionality in all switches end up dumbing down the feature set, we are not against having every single installation of our software be different - tailored to your switch, your needs, your business. That's always been the success of FreePBX. FreePBX3 is a rewrite from the ground up. It is a fully pluggable module-based system that's object-oriented using PHP5 and improves on lessons learned from previous version of FreePBX. We also merged ideas and lessons learned from the Phonebooth project and the TCAPI project.

I hope you will join us in building a stronger FreePBX - regardless of what switch you decide to choose.

You can get more information at www.freepbx.org, or join our IRC channel at #freepbx-dev on Freenode (irc.freenode.net)

An additional point to keep in mind about the choice of FreeSWITCH for the starting point is very simple: FreeSWITCH is quite possibly the most flexible and scalable telephony platform in the world today. It can do so many things that even if the FreePBX3 devs limited their feature set "only" to things FS can do they'd still have a complete platform with features unavailable elsewhere.

FreeSWITCH can do just about anything in terms of being a scalable soft-switch. If it isn't the most powerful, versatile telephony platform in the world today - proprietary or OSS - I don't know what is. I'd be interested in hearing what others have to say on the subject.

-MC

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