Last week marked a sad point in the history of Open Source, the highly acclaimed and established Asterisk distribution was taken down from the Internet, leaving all of its users, followers, eco-system, resellers, integrators and more with a gigantic void to be filled.

While the void will be filled at some point, I can’t but help but observe the joy and cheerfulness of the proprietary telecommunications industry, as 3CX had rapidly taken over the Elastix business in such brutal manner. According to the various discussions in the Open Source community, the entire thing was cause by, a so called “violation of copyright” or “violation of IP” of some sort, within the Open Source communities. In the past, as far as I know, when various distributions or projects violated each other’s copyright, they would notify one another – and would ask to rectify the situation. Apparently, this hadn’t happened here – or if it happened, it wasn’t published in an open manner – as you would expect.

One of the things that the community started shouting was: “Elastix had been trixboxed”. Honestly, I don’t see the similarity between the two cases. When fonality acquired trixbox, they had a clear indication of where they are going. This is not 3CX acquired Elastix, this is 3CX obliterated Elastix. This is something completely different – and with major personas in the open source community indicating that a certain, well known and renowned, Open Source persona was involved in this happening, I can only be highly offended by the everlasting stench of people’s own ambition and personal hatred towards things that are not their own.

I admit it, I never really used Elastix in my projects, I found it to be bloated, inflated with software that shouldn’t be there, too slow for my taste and with a lack of proper project leadership, patches went in and out like crazy. Yet, I can’t argue with their success and the acceptance of the product around the world. I remember being at VoIP2Today in Madrid only a few weeks ago, and there were Elastix boxes sitting on tables. Yes, Elastix wasn’t my first choice for an Office PBX, but yes, they were a choice – the idea of a commercial company coming in and removing that choice off the table – is just annoying and troubling at the same time.

My hope is that some Elastix developers will simply post the entire source code to Github or some other public repository, slapping a BSD/MIT license on their work – telling the world: “Here is our creation, the proprietary daemons decided it should die – but no one can kill an idea!” – and Elastix will keep on living in the Open Source like other projects. If the world will forget it, then so be its fate – but if the world needs it, let the world take it in two hands and raise it up to the sky and say: “You shall not die!”