WTF Sangoma

Posted 2025-02-25 at 16:16. ~8min read.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are solely my personal views and opinions. These do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of any company or project that I am (or have been) associated with.

Background

In 2018, Sangoma announced their acquisition of Digium and yatta yatta yatta became the “owners” of Asterisk, FreePBX, and some other things.

At the time of the acquisition, Asterisk maintained a very healthy (and active) community; led by David Duffett.

Digression re David

David is a personal friend whom I dearly care for. I say this to say that when I compliment David, I do have a bias, as again… he’s a friend. This said, David and I don’t agree on everything, can have disagreements, and will criticize each other.

As we get older and mature in life, we can have disagreements with people and still be friends.

Shocking, I know.

If David, or any of my friends for that matter, criticize me, I don’t stop the friendship.

It takes courage and respect to criticize a friend. You should take criticism and ponder it. Don’t have to do what friends say/suggest… but you certainly shouldn’t end friendships over someone caring enough about you to mention a concern.

Anyway, I personally think David did an amazing job as Digium’s Asterisk Community Director and was a big factor in the success, friendliness, and size of that community. Probably one of the reasons why it was also so active.

End Digression

Since the acquisition, Sangoma has lost an incredible amount of talent… too many to list. It would be difficult to describe a community that may/may not exist. Astricon, once attended by thousands now is a side show at another event.

The Astricon you miss no longer exists.
— me

My past articles…

Whats New Pussycat

When we last left off with Sangoma Continues to Disappoint, I discussed that I was optimistic when Sangoma hired Chris Maj to be their “Open Source Solutions Advocate.”

One of his first actions was to suspend James Finstrom from the FreePBX community boards.

Since then, it’s gone downhill.

FreePBX is doing a major change in v17… switching to Debian OS. Any change should have some issues, and well, that’s expected. People though, on the FreePBX Community Boards have been complaining that support is not helpful and just running normal updates can break production systems.

The responses from Chris Maj range from helpful to argumentative.

Just before Christmas, in a post titled Holiday Hugs for Off-Topic Fans, people asked about James’ continued ban as well as expressed concerns regarding the moderation of the forums.

Chris was very argumentative and I thought perhaps I could chime in…

For what it's worth, and as someone that has been very vocal about the mishandling of the community since Sangoma's acquisition of Digium...

The way to handle disagreement is to reach out. The way to build back (or build period) a community is to reach out, even to those who have publicly (and openly) criticized you.

"I irritated Lorne a time or two with some post, but he would reach out and we would have a conversation and work it out."

There's a lot to be said there. To paraphrase the mouse... This is the way.

There's precedent here as well. David Duffett, greatly rebuilt the community post freeswitch and some very public disagreement on the direction of asterisk. It was great to see the freeswitch and asterisk teams go from adversaries to community members. It's not very difficult to find common ground with people that would even visit the forum.

The recent bans are against people who obviously have a great interest in the success and continued growth of the freepbx and asterisk projects. They also have track records of contributions (and when you exclude the contributions from when employed by Sangoma, they still have a track record of support and contribution).

If someone with a history of support expresses criticism publicly, it is my personal opinion, that banning or aggressive rule enforcement is the wrong way to go. The better way would be to reach out (even privately if needed) and work together. This was not done... and the DMs sent are the opposite of what I'm suggestion by reaching out.

Anyway, my two cents. I really wish there would be something significant... some good effort to try to build back a community. Haven't seen any of y'all at a conference (other than your own) in years. And I'm not even talking just the telecom software conferences...

Anyone from Sangoma present at Fosdem since Matt introduced Asterisk 16?

To close... would be better to embrace the long term members being vocal about problems rather than going for a Streisand effect.

The post didn’t help… arguments continued… I tried again:

Since my last didn't help...

The best ways to handle disagreements and build the community, include:

- active listening
- seeking common ground
- finding solutions
- maintaining respect
- trying to understand others' point of view

What doesn't work is:

- trying to win an argument
- personal attacks
- blaming

You have a chance to lead a community... and there's a lot of us hoping you can do so. But your continued need to argue with community members, play the blame game, and set a combative tone isn't helping to do so.

I implore you to try a different approach.

Crickets.

I stayed away for the most part. I’d mostly moved to other telephony systems to work with what I do; ones that still maintain a presence in the open source VoIP community (like FreeSWITCH/SignalWire, RTPengine/sipwise, Janus, Drachtio, Jambonz, etc).

At the start of February, Sangoma banned James yet again (from the forums). Tony Lewis posted about it in James has been banned once again.

People were very critical of the ban, and Chris (as per usual) was argumentative and defensive in response.

Chris Sherwood of Crosstalk Solutions, who had not posted in 9 months, decided to post. Chris happens to have a very popular YouTube channel dedicated to networking/telecommunications (over 450k subscribers).

Chris’ post was very critical of the current state of affairs and was immediately hidden and his account banned.

A screen shot of his post:

The lack of input from anyone else at Sangoma speaks volumes.

It shows a complete lack of regard for the FreePBX community and the project itself. Where is Mike White? Where is Nenad? If I were the VP or CTO of a publicly traded company, I would be straight up embarrassed to have any association with Chris Maj, and I would be the first one to pull them off of the front lines of these community forums.

You're running one of the world's most popular open-source projects. Given the nature of open source, you rely on the community's contributions in terms of helping others, providing feedback, and development. You should be doing everything that you can to nuture and foster those contributions coming from people freely giving their own time to something they believe in. Instead we get silence.

Chris Maj has single-handedly poisoned these forums, and you're letting him do it. There's a zero percent chance that the two of you are unaware of this situation, but we get silence.

As a business owner myself who has been directly responsible for hiring and firing folks at various companies for the past 25 years, I can safely say that Chris Maj is the type of person | would never hire. The way that he conducts himself publicly is so telling of who he is as a person that I shudder to think what he's like in his private life. His childish behavior is a reflection on Sangoma, and the fact that it hasn't stopped, nor have we heard a single word from anyone else just strengthens that reflection. Sangoma appears to be rotten at the core...it is not a healthy company:

Given that, this will be my last ever post to these forums. I'm leaving, and l urge others to do the same. Leave Sangoma in the past where it belongs and migrate to where your time and efforts are appreciated. Sangoma isn't going to all of a sudden turn around and breathe new life into FreePBX. Sangoma is a company struggling to innovate and survive after all of their core talent either left or was fired leaving only their B-Team to pick up the slack, which is what leads to people like Chris Maj running the community forums.

And why is Chris Maj permitted to get away with destroying this community? Because Sangoma does not care about this community. So ask yourself then, why should you care about Sangoma?

You shouldn't. Just leave.

It went downhill from there.

Eventually Nenad Corbic posted (hadn’t posted in 7 months) and Joshua Colp posts saying that there would be better handling of criticism. Of course, Chris’ post is still hidden.

I don’t know what Sangoma’s goal with open source is…

Since they’ve taken over the project they’ve engaged in FUD against open source (to promote their commercial products), disengaged from the open source VoIP community, and let Astricon falter into a side show of ITEXPO.

On one hand they complain that they’re not given credit enough for their support of Asterisk/FreePBX, yet on the other hand they’re taking other open source, relabeling as their own, and not giving any credit to the original project/authors (ie Sangoma Meet vs Jitsi Meet).

I’m saddened by the current state of affairs of Asterisk/FreePBX. At this point, I have to agree with Chris Sherwood…

Why should I care about Sangoma? I shouldn’t. I should just leave.