Those of you who know me know that I’m very passionate about open source and about open source telephony projects. As the VP of Open Source Community Development here at Sangoma, I’m proud of the work that we’ve been able to do to ensure that the Asterisk and FreePBX open source projects remain strong and vibrant. It has also been thrilling to me to watch so many people deploy open-source based solutions to help address the current COVID-19 pandemic.
All that being said, I’m writing this blog post to let you know that this is my last week at Sangoma. I have decided to take on a new role with Simwood, a UK based company with operations in the US. Even though I will be leaving Sangoma, I will continue to work with my friends here in an advisory role as needed regarding FreePBX, Asterisk, and open source. I want to make it clear that my departure was purely a personal one, and it was simply a great new opportunity for me. I am 100% confident in Sangoma’s commitment to open source and its leadership in open source communications.
During my tenure as the leader of Sangoma’s open source community, we fostered transparent, inclusive communications between the community and our teams to invest in the success of both of these projects. Sangoma will continue to keep up the good work as stewards of the FreePBX and Asterisk open source projects and remains 100% committed to you, the people who work with, contribute to, and feel passion for open source telephony.
As mentioned above, I will also continue to help Sangoma in an external advisory role and in case you’re wondering, I’m not leaving either of the open source projects — I’ll continue to be active in the mailing lists and forums and IRC channels — just as a community contributor once again. I’ll also continue my work to package Asterisk and related tools for Fedora/RHEL/CentOS as I have done for the past several years.
With my departure, Lorne Gaetz has been promoted to the new role of Director of Open Source Community. In his position, Lorne will continue the effort to engage with both Asterisk and FreePBX open source communities, be an evangelist/advocate for Sangoma’s open source efforts and to translate community/customer requirements into a product direction for Asterisk, FreePBX, and PBXact. For those of you who have spent any significant time in the FreePBX and Asterisk forums know that he’s a powerful force for good, and I wish him all the best in his new role. Please join with me in welcoming him to the new role.
Matthew Fredrickson will continue to oversee and lead the engineering of the Asterisk project and the FreePBX project with the help of Lorne Gaetz, Josh Colp, Kapil Gupta, Michael White, Nenad Corbic and many other great technical giants who remain at Sangoma.
“I wish Jared all the best in this new chapter of his career and look forward to working with him in the public domain of Asterisk and FreePBX. Although he will be missed, the FreePBX and Asterisk projects will continue to thrive with many great people here at Sangoma, who dedicate their careers to push the boundaries of open source communications.” – Matthew Fredrickson, Director of Open Source Software Development
“Thank you Jared for all your work and leadership while at Sangoma and I wish you all the best in your next chapter. I am very excited to have Lorne take on this new role and see it as a testament to how deep our open source talent pool truly is at Sangoma. I look forward to the leadership he will bring to Sangoma’s open source initiatives. The open source team has made amazing progress on FreePBX and Asterisk projects over the last year: FreePBX core stability and expanded QA, E911 (Kari’s law and the Ray Baum act) , FreePBX backup restore from 13/14 to 15, and mirror infrastructure updates. Along with new PBXact 15, Call Accounting and Advanced Recovery modules. On the up and coming Asterisk 18 side of things, we’ve continued to make improvements to Asterisk’s SFU video functionality, added support for STIR/SHAKEN, significantly improved CODEC negotiation, and made call debugging even easier with pcap generation support and much, much, more. This next year will be even better with much more to come! ” – Nenad Corbic, CTO
As I look back, I see a very strong, dedicated and passionate Sangoma Open Source team that is extremely capable and dedicated to open source, FreePBX, and Asterisk. I have no doubt that they will continue to do great things and am excited to see what comes next!
If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to Matt and Lorne at opensourcefeedback@sangoma.com or Nenad Corbic at ncorbic@sangoma.com.