After the initial feedback on lack of Asterisk support for FreePBX, the dust have now settled.

But let's take a step back in time - approximately 15 months. Back then, the Trixbox people decided to spawn off their own version of FreePBX. I then stated that I really hoped that the FreePBX developers would not loose faith over this decision.

Fast forward to the last days announcements regarding version 3.0 of FreePBX.

Granted - it does not yet have Asterisk support, but keep in mind that this is a developer release, this means the support will eventually be there. As I will show in this article, is really does not matter if there is no Asterisk support yet.

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According to Todd Barr, FreePBX version 3 will not support Asterisk when released. The support will be added "at a later stage".

On the good side, FreePBX now support FreeSWITCH.

In sum this really is good news for the FreeSWITCH crowd - finally they are getting a GUI that is well known in the Open Source VoIP community.

I have not yet tried FreePBX on top of FreeSWITCH - but if it does indeed deliver what it has done so far on Asterisk, FreeSWITCH will be a easier beast to configure.

Currently FreeSWITCH is quite messy to configure if you come from an Asterisk background. Even if you do not come from an Asterisk background, configuring FreeSWITCH for the first time is a daunting task.

Even if I have not yet seen version 3 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.

For contenders to FreePBX, this is possible the best news this year - these contenders now get the chance to really excel in this market.

I really hope there are any takers our there - both commercial and Open Source.