@JaredBusch said:

No, you are missing the entire point. There is a reason that Elastix dropped FreePBX in 3.0. There is a reason the the PBXiaF team has spent the time and effort to come up with the Asterisk GUI distribution.

Both teams obviously hope that nothing changes as they are also continuing efforts with their products that use FreePBX.

FreePBX is a horrible interface. It is dated and sad. It works, mostly, but leaves a lot to be desired. Ever since FreePBX switched from being an interface to being a full on competitor to Elastix and PIAF they have had a huge incentive, really a need, to develop their own thing. If anything, my guess is that they hope that FreePBX does do something drastic and force them to either take over or abandon FreePBX, not that they fear that. I felt for years that they needed to do this, having nothing to do with source worries with FreePBX.

Simple business pressures would make them do what they are doing. Nothing more is needed.

Just seen a nice post on the Elastix forums. Someone went through the trouble to manually compare a 2.4 install and list the updates needed.

http://forum.elastix.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=130440

I think I'll be testing this out.

@Reid-Cooper said:

Hopefully this means even more commercial development in FreePBX. It's a good product but could use polishing.

The new version that "just" became stable is fairly good. I'm going to deploy it to replace an old Trixbox server at our NC site. Not flashy by any stretch but very functional.

@Katie said:

What are the pros and cons of implementing an open-source PBX as opposed to a proprietary system?
I've worked in shops that ran Cisco Unity, and after that - Shoretel. I found Shoretel to be a great deal easier to learn over the Cisco system and had a fairly easy time administering it.
How do these compare to something like Elastix or Asterisk?
3CX is also a good solution, but it is not an open source one. I personally do not prefer it, but if you have a windows license to spare for a VM, it is quite easy to setup and not nearly as expensive as other options.
I use PBX in a Flash simply because I do not need the simplified Elastix interface and I want more up to date versions. If the Elastix team put more effort into staying updated I would use it everywhere.

You hit the nail on the head about the true cost of switching the phone system though. No matter what you go to, if it is not a true upgrade,you will have to redesign all of the call handling from scratch. The thing you need to validate with you upgrade is whether or not it is a 100% no reconfig needed upgrade. If there is time not accounted for to do something like that, then you just leveled the playing field again.