Kazoo Version 5 open source

[nick]

@krzykat is super right here. All projects I have been using or I have been involved are using this approach. It was surprising when Kazoo did make sharp turn with v5.  Their "jump right to it" argument also does not seems valid, when somebody release beta product actually they would love to see bunch of support requests so they can improve their product. Comparing with other projects, Kazoo is not getting such an amount of support requests from OSS community at all.

Overall I think they are just looking for a reasons to "close" Kazoo. But would be more fair to community if they just say the real reason, which I think most of us already know and will be not surprised.

[mc_]

I appreciate the discussion, but I think you all overestimate the "usefulness" of bug reports from the community and underestimate the effort we have to take to properly investigate the report.

KAZOO is not closing; I will quit the company if that decision is made. I have been promised from C-level execs that what was open in v4 will be open again in v5. If that promise is reneged, my resignation will be close behind.

So, I hear you all, I continue to advocate for opening sooner rather than later, there is lots going on behind the scenes, etc etc.

[krzykat]

1 hour ago, mc_ said:

I appreciate the discussion, but I think you all overestimate the "usefulness" of bug reports from the community and underestimate the effort we have to take to properly investigate the report.

KAZOO is not closing; I will quit the company if that decision is made. I have been promised from C-level execs that what was open in v4 will be open again in v5. If that promise is reneged, my resignation will be close behind.

So, I hear you all, I continue to advocate for opening sooner rather than later, there is lots going on behind the scenes, etc etc.

Thank you very much for your support.  I think some folks here are just expressing their frustration on wanting to support a product that is very good and has the potential to be great.  I know people keep beating you up about release dates / timelines which you don't have full details for or can't answer.  I think if there were at least some communication from you on projected dates/timelines/roadmap ... then it could give those that are waiting to bolt on their own mods that they want to sell in the new kazoo marketplace, then you'd probably see some people acting more positive.  I think people seeing that 5.1 is now coming out and still no OSS displayed, then they feel that is a sign of closing the source.  JMHO.

[Bitrate]

Thanks for that personal take _mc, we appreciate your candor. However, we have all been frustrated with Signal Wire's failure to release version 5 into open source, despite promising to do so two years ago. This lack of transparency and commitment to open source principles is a serious concern for those who have invested time, effort, and resources into the project.

The open source community has always been built on the foundation of transparency, collaboration, and mutual respect. Open source projects allow developers to work together, share knowledge and expertise, and contribute to the greater good. However, when companies make promises to release their projects into open source, they must fulfill those promises, or else it undermines the very principles on which open source is based.

Signal Wire promised to release version 5 into open source, but it has been two years, and the community is still waiting. This has led to frustration and disappointment among contributors who have invested their time, effort, and resources into the project. These contributors are being led on by Signal Wire, and this is not fair to them.

The lack of transparency from Signal Wire is also a serious concern. Open source projects rely on transparency to build trust and confidence in the community. When companies make promises and fail to deliver, it erodes the trust of the community and undermines the principles on which open source is built.

We are not asking for handouts or favors. We are simply asking for companies to fulfill their promises and respect the principles of transparency, collaboration, and mutual respect that underpin the open source movement. Signal Wire must live up to its commitments and release version 5 into open source. The company owes it to the community that has contributed so much to the project.

We need a firm date or perhaps the truth, a statement explaining there will be no v5 open source version. 

Edited April 5, 2023 by Bitrate (see edit history)

[KNERD]

Ummm @Bitrate, this is 2600Hz, not Signal Wire.

 

It has already been stated Kazoo version 5 will be released once the app marketplace has been opened. That is the bigger issue as it has been over three years now, and still no marketplace released.

Edited April 5, 2023 by KNERD (see edit history)

[Bitrate]

Apologies for the confusion, but the idea remains the same. All bullshit excuses and no deliverables. Give a date or tell the truth about 2600hz closing the source code as they have done for 2 years.

[mc_]

@BitrateI hear the frustration and I share it. However, I also think you overstate the community's contributions to KAZOO. Can you honestly quantify the impact of the community on KAZOO? This is a serious question because when I've looked at commits from non-2600Hz employees to KAZOO (from whistle 1.0 to KAZOO 4.3), Monster UI, and our doc repos, the disparity is glaring.

Don't misunderstand me, I appreciate the community that does exist and contributes feedback and bug reports and I hope we get back to that sharing soon; however when businesses take KAZOO and make money off it and don't contribute (proliferate examples from mega corps on down) then its a harder task to justify the business side of keeping development open. We have costs and no VC funding so rely entirely on our paying customers to keep things moving.

It's a whole debate across OSS, open core, alternative licensing, etc and I haven't seen any consensus on how to balance developing open source software and putting food on the table. Curious for all suggestions towards making OSS a sustainable way to do business?

[Bitrate]

The issue here is, you guys aren't encouraging the community to do anything, in-fact it's just the opposite.  You are killing the community spirit and any members that may want to make great contributions. The behavior exhibited by 2600hz is further eroding any trust the community has in them and the project itself.  Then your bosses will further make the case that open source doesn't help them just as you are trying to make now; It's a self fulfilling prophecy. You have to nurture and encourage the community with trust and feedback, not the opposite.

You want to make money with OSS, you need maximum adoption and sell support that people can count on. People can't trust 2600hz and honestly, companies have gone with other vendors because of it (I tell you this from personal experience with my employer and Kazoo).

[esoare]

24 minutes ago, Bitrate said:

People can't trust 2600hz and honestly, companies have gone with other vendors because of it (I tell you this from personal experience with my employer and Kazoo).

I disagree. (Not because I'm an admin) 

I completely trust 2600hz with my clients. 

I'm not a developer, but a hosted reseller. 

Eugen Soare

[Bitrate]

Esoare, so you're an admin (this in and of itself is biased) and already a customer. Thats not who we are talking about here, its the prospective customers they are trying to attract. How about we get some feedback from other frustrated community members? They might have already left these forums long ago though as even this thread is years old.

[mc_]

@Bitrate you missed it above - potential customers are using KAZOO, are not getting support contracts or custom development from us, are not submitting code or doc improvements. I can't get my team paid their salary based on potential customers who use KAZOO. These potential customers have millions in VC funding so its not a bootstrapped, garage-based startup that we're dealing with.

Again, I totally hear you and wish we didn't have this tension between the commercial 2600Hz arm and the open source KAZOO arm.

I will appeal to authority a bit here - I've been involved from the get-go, 2010. In that time, 2600Hz has paid me a salary to develop KAZOO, 90% of which is open source. I have maintained google groups, this forum, the docs site, IRC channel, community Slack channels, KAZOOCon, FreeSWITCH and KAZOO trainings, a bi-weekly hour-long community call, and more that I'm probably forgetting at the moment.

So don't question mine or 2600Hz's commitment to the community.

We've been out here for 13 years, making a go of it in OSS. We have community members here, haven't paid us a dollar, riding with us since the Whistle days. If folks fall off because we're not "open source" enough for them, go find another company or project that does it better! Bon chance to them.

We are at an interesting juncture where large companies are using KAZOO without contributing, competing with our paying customers for sales. We're navigating it as best we can, both us who believe in OSS and the business side that wants to keep us employed and paid.

[krzykat]

@mc_ I have always thought a nice niche for OSS monetization is that on the low end there are folks that tinker, develop, maybe make a few bucks off the efforts.  But for those that are making any real money, they MUST help fund the development.  I mean how  would you count on something with your millions on VC if you didn't have skin in the game?  I mean, how can they do that and then what if there is a problem or if kazoo disappeared?  Like I have said to a few clients before "You want me to make money".  Cause if I don't, I fold, and then you have nothing.  I understand saving a buck, and for a small guy with say 100 extensions, they can't really justify a $5K - $20K / month expenditure.  But when they get big enough to have 10,000 extensions, then they better be helping on the develpment, and funding.  Finding that middle ground, I admit is difficult.  From what I've seen from other OSS projects are those that are making their serious money from it, realize they must pay maintenance contracts to keep their stuff working, and getting custom code done to supplement things.  Sometimes some limit how much is out with the OSS, and the other parts are commercial.  Then they get paid from the commerical as well as contracts.

[KNERD]

I gotta agree with BitRate on killing the community.  There are hardly any videos about Kazoo or 2600Hz posted online. Even the so-called 2022 "KazooCon" was only online, and all the videos posted about the event are all UNLISTED. Seriously? 

[mc_]

9 minutes ago, krzykat said:

@mc_ I have always thought a nice niche for OSS monetization is that on the low end there are folks that tinker, develop, maybe make a few bucks off the efforts.  But for those that are making any real money, they MUST help fund the development.  I mean how  would you count on something with your millions on VC if you didn't have skin in the game?  I mean, how can they do that and then what if there is a problem or if kazoo disappeared?  Like I have said to a few clients before "You want me to make money".  Cause if I don't, I fold, and then you have nothing.  I understand saving a buck, and for a small guy with say 100 extensions, they can't really justify a $5K - $20K / month expenditure.  But when they get big enough to have 10,000 extensions, then they better be helping on the develpment, and funding.  Finding that middle ground, I admit is difficult.  From what I've seen from other OSS projects are those that are making their serious money from it, realize they must pay maintenance contracts to keep their stuff working, and getting custom code done to supplement things.  Sometimes some limit how much is out with the OSS, and the other parts are commercial.  Then they get paid from the commerical as well as contracts.

Agreed on having skin in the game, especially because we know they're using KAZOO as a core component of their main line of business. They're content to make a go of it alone though.

 

[krzykat]

Yes, that's a problem with OSS I guess.  They can always take what you've done, fork it, and make a full product out of it.  I don't lik eit in that I'm a little guy with big asperations.  I can afford OS, learn, and grow till I get to the point that it makes it finanically feasabile to buy hosting or a large maintenance package.  But if that avenue isn't available, I must look at other options and other vendors.  Then if you grow with another vendor, I think you're more likely to spend your money there and stay there.  Anyhow, I hope that Kazoo does as you said and release 5.x OSS, but if the decision is to not do so, I think people would like to know.  I've got plans for at least 2 different products that I want to add to the app store, but if its not going open, kind of negates me doing the development.

 

[Sergey K]

The big issue in my opinion was that is no configuration changes backported to 4.3. For example, kamailio and freeswitch updating almost every week by Luis, and nothing released for 4.3 for a years. Centos 7 will be soon end of life and will not receive any critical patches anymore. I personally don't care about market place at the moment, will be nice to have it at some point, but for me is most important to get improvement in voice quality, stability and features. I'm pretty sure that freeswitch and kamailio get whole bunch of new features for last couple years. James is the only person who support us as much as he can and I appreciate it very much. Unfortunately I don't see other knowledgeable people from a team like JR or Lazedo in IRC or here . 

Just my 2 Cents...

[Marcin Muzylo]

14 hours ago, mc_ said:

I appreciate the discussion, but I think you all overestimate the "usefulness" of bug reports from the community and underestimate the effort we have to take to properly investigate the report.

KAZOO is not closing; I will quit the company if that decision is made. I have been promised from C-level execs that what was open in v4 will be open again in v5. If that promise is reneged, my resignation will be close behind.

So, I hear you all, I continue to advocate for opening sooner rather than later, there is lots going on behind the scenes, etc etc.

thank you @mc_ for your work and support , we only need to have clear message from @2600Hz @Darren Schreiber if KAZOO v5 will be soon open or not, thats all.

[KNERD]

13 hours ago, Sergey K said:

The big issue in my opinion was that is no configuration changes backported to 4.3. For example,

 

I do believe it was mentioned somewhere in this thread that version 4.x is done with. Meaning no further work will be done on it at all.

[Mooseable]

@mc_ appreciate the input. I'm personally happy to pay 2600hz, especially for apps. However, a small operation like mine tried to get a quote and it was all USA hosting for a lot considering our small customer base.

I did suggest that 2600hz could host the kazoo apps nodes only, keeping the IP protected without having to run a full cluster, which seemed to garner some positive feedback from 2600hz, but I don't think it went anywhere.

Its probably what the app exchange is targeted for.

I'm happy to contribute to docs, for v5. But it has felt like a wasted effort to write docs for v4 since it seems the change to v5 would be drastic.

I personally would love to hear what would be most helpful to contribute. I'm only one person and I'm extremely time poor, so knowing where my efforts would be most impactful would be good to know.

I will add, I do try to contribute from time to time, but my PR from 3 years ago is still open (and still fixes an active issue)

[KNERD]

On 4/9/2023 at 10:14 AM, Mooseable said:

@mc_ appreciate the input. I'm personally happy to pay 2600hz, especially for apps. However, a small operation like mine tried to get a quote and it was all USA hosting for a lot considering our small customer base.

 

I will add, I do try to contribute from time to time, but my PR from 3 years ago is still open (and still fixes an active issue)

About the same time they stopped working on version 4

[fmateo05]

Give it  by closed source; anyway it is already privative software. It is time for develop a fork of any mode.  The biggest blow to privative and/or proprietary software is writing good code. Particularly at this time I agree with OSS version but also completely against of open-core philosophy.  'OSS folks' should be reunited to plan some development disregarding any open-core components, and distribute it in parallel with the closed source; i would further give examples (someone of you may already know) about some succesful OSS alternatives that began with closing the source.
 

[Chris Labonne]

As soon as we fork, that will be the time they go and release the v5 code to the community. But I really can't argue against @fmateo05here.  I'd like to see a release based on v4 that allows admins to get a PAT from SignalWire to keep FreeSWITCH up to date. And there are some features regarding shared call appearance that might be good to develop into this stack. 

[RuhNet]

2 hours ago, Chris Labonne said:

As soon as we fork, that will be the time they go and release the v5 code to the community. But I really can't argue against @fmateo05here.  I'd like to see a release based on v4 that allows admins to get a PAT from SignalWire to keep FreeSWITCH up to date. And there are some features regarding shared call appearance that might be good to develop into this stack. 

You can manually install the latest Freeswitch can't you? Keeping latest FS in sync with Kazoo repo adds another layer of management complexity, so to be honest I'd rather have the default repo be the older (it's not all that old) version of Freeswitch that is guaranteed to work fine with the other Kazoo RPMs, rather than having breakages happen every so often and then having to wait on a fix or revert or whatever. in the mean time there's nothing stopping anyone from using the official Freeswitch repo. It's just a matter of setting your yum config for it. 🤷‍♂️

[RuhNet]

To be honest I think these nitpicky complaints are exactly [part of] the reason v5 has been delayed --- it's impossible to please everyone, and all these statements like "YOU (2600Hz) should have latest Freeswitch", "YOU should fix this XYZ bug...", "YOU should support ABC, XYZ because I want it to make money for myself...", "YOU should have released v5 two years ago when it wasn't ready so you could put up with me complaining about it for the past two years" probably don't really give 2600Hz a warm feeling about the OSS community.

So why should 2600Hz release something when they know it's not ready, and it will only unleash a barrage of [free] help requests, criticism, and general bad feelings toward 2600Hz? Especially when the amount of help given back to 2600Hz by the community is somewhat limited.

To be clear---I use Open Source Kazoo, I want new features, I want fixes, I want all of it to be open source (Konami hehe). I've been chomping at the bit to have v5 as long as anyone else. But at the same time, I do understand their position, and I understand why the app store has been delayed so long---it's hard to make software not pirate-able, but at the same time not a nightmare to install and use and maintain. I do wish they would go ahead and release everything else, so we could begin to work with it, but I don't know all the ins and outs of v5 to know if that's doable without a great deal of effort.

So, everybody, just relax. :)  Unless of course you are willing to put your money where your mouth is and actually offer to pay for certain things to be fixed, or offer to fix (and contribute) certain things yourself. :-D

I don't think a fork is warranted at this time---forks are sometimes good things, but most people grossly underestimate the amount of work involved in maintaining a medium-large codebase. And unless something changes I really don't think our OS Kazoo community has enough high power developer talent to make a fork a real success, so any benefits I think would be minimal.

I'm hoping we'll hear good news concerning OS v5 around Kazoocon this year. If not, then I may begin to reconsider my position. But until then I'm just going to be patient and do the best I can with what we have now.

Edited June 20, 2023 by RuhNet (see edit history)

[krzykat]

@RuhNet   It's now been I think 3 years.  What do you think is a reasonable time period?  Also - people complaining about this and that .. its OSS, not freeware.  YOu have no expectations, and the beauty of OSS is that others can help (I know its not often , but it can still be helpful).  If nothing else, than having people let you know about bugs is a big help.

I understand the need to monetize (as I bet most people on this thread are monetizing it and making money or want to make money with Kazoo), but also understand and agree with the comments of "If you're going to close the source, just let people know".