I would like to take this moment to ask that you institute an "upgrade" or "trade in" process for commercial modules that offers a discount to users who are looking to step up to purchasing more modules. This is something I've ran into and asked your support. It can be very upsetting to purchase System Builder Plus to realize you really should have just went all out on Call Center Builder because you need VQ Plus and/or QXact Reports. Perhaps that realization comes a month in, maybe it comes 2 years in. I know a lot of people that use FreePBX don't do telephony all day, every day. It is very easy to make a mistake that basically makes your $525 purchase useless and requires you to spend $1275 all over again (or in the case I gave $475+$795, at which point you might as well just by the $1275 call center bundle).
Now onto this news. When I saw the blog post on this it was before the email or this forum post. I checked all over other forums as well looking to see if anyone was discussing it. It seems like now there is some discussing so I can bring up some of my concerns.
- Major Security Vulnerabilities. If plans haven't been made to allow patching of major security issues that might arise in commercial modules without requiring someone to purchase renewals, I STRONGLY recommend you reconsider.
- EPM. How is this going to work with EPM? Firmware updates won't get pushed to me anymore after the first year? New phones won't show anymore after the year? For me, I use the same phones for a LONG time, they really don't change often and there are only a handful of popular brands and models anyway. But firmware is something I constantly update because it is a simple way to make sure new features and bug fixes get pushed to phones. Yealink is what I use. Some of Yealinks firmware updates even address issues the phones have with FreePBX and other commercial modules. If this stops I'll have to consider looking for a way to upload firmware to EPM on my own (is that even possible?).
- System Admin Pro. So after the first year, does the ability to upgrade FreePBX through the GUI stop? I've had a handful of issues with it to begin with (updates saying they complete but nothing actually happens or updates not showing up in the GUI and having to do them manually anyway).
- As someone else mentioned, bugs. I really hope that the "year" isn't some hardcoded thing because if you guys release a module update that breaks something or introduces a substantial bug, people are going to get very upset that something they paid for doesn't work. People are much more forgiving of these issues when you can submit a bug report and know that more then likely someone will fix it and it will get pushed to you through a module update. When that stops being the case people are going to be much less forgiving of issues that prevent the module from doing what it is supposed to do. Also realize that this will surely cause a decrease in the number of users running the most "recent" modules, which means less testers and less bug reports, but not necessarily less bugs.
I'll stop here as I have work to get to. But I sure hope this doesn't negatively effect my deployments.