Hi Anthony,

I wanted to answer all replays that are very good in the answer they gave, but ending up answering yours.

As FS is first of all an open source project, and all of us here have bills, family etc.. The intent of my question was actually how we as community, can help.
It was not a criticize of the features and development speed in any way, sorry that it understood as such.

FS is a full FLOSS project, that have better support (in features and ease of use), then many other PBX's, that mostly are commercially, and some have companies behind them.
You guys do amazing work here, and I cannot criticize it in any way, the opposite, I'm amazed at your work (I don't know if I could do it myself).

I'm looking for a way to give back, because I'm using FS, and the LTS was an idea of how to think in the manner.
Giovanni Maruzzelli provided a good answer that provide one direction in the manner of LTS.

But how I (and probably others that might want to) as an open source user can give back to the open source project and the rest of the community?
How I can help to this project?

That's why I asked regarding the community rather then commercially help (such as contributing money, having paying for support etc...).


Thank you all for all the answers
Ido

On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 6:47 PM, Anthony Minessale <anthony.minessale@gmail.com> wrote:
We are working on cutting edge technology, requirements and factors change quickly.  Each version lasts about 2 years.  1 year in active development and 1 year of backports.  

When we were slow to get releases out we were critisized for it.  When we find a consistent release cycle we are critisized for it.  Just like we are critisized on both sides of using system libs or whatever distro.

We need to keep it in perspective that we only provide community resources on a best ability basis and we are doing it for free.  We have commercial packages and services as well and those concerned with this type of issue discussed in this thread can consider those services and the shape support will be driven by the needs of those customers.  The revenue from customers help expand the services we can provide.

People often forget when using open source that it takes everone involved to keep it running.  


On Sunday, November 22, 2015, Francis <sms@icefire.qza.net.au> wrote:
Perhaps it wouldn't be necessary to add another line as such, but keep the production version around for an extra year or two and allow the development version to roll through a few releases before it officially becomes "stable". Or, have Stable, Testing and Unstable as per Debian.

Time the stable release with an updated Freeswitch book + cookbook, docs etc and it would promote a more cohesive and predictable platform to work with. Case in point, I deliberately stalled off a project until 1.6 was released, because I didn't want to waste time on old code. I could get away with it in that instance, but in most cases, stalling = lost business.

Of course, the drawback of LTS is the delay of new features. Whether or not FS is at a stage where it (or we) could hold out for years between releases is a fair question to ask.

On 22/11/2015 7:32 PM, Giovanni Maruzzelli wrote:

The core developers at the moment simply do not have the resources for more than two lines of "official" development:
- one has to be production, the one you use in servers
- one has to be development, the one that will be the next production

Because of effort put into allowong users time for transition, now the core developers are maintaining three lines: 1.6 (production), 1.6 (development), 1.4 (old prodution).

As obvious, in a short time will be necessary for core developers to begin working on next release (1.8).

Because resources are finite, is not possible to ask core developers for maintaining an LTS as part of the community project.

On the contrary, I believe this LTS thing can be a source of revenue for a maintainer, or a company.

Is a matter of taking care of security and bug fixes in a software version you would not use, because is stale. Someone else is making money from  that version you would not use, and is asking you to help him milking.

I believe that if there is enough commercial, paying interest in an LTS, a single maintainer or a company will step out to take care of it. Or maybe this revenue stream can allow for the.core developers to hire someone for this purpose.

Anyway, I believe that the key is showing a paying interest.

So, how to do it?

Crowfounding, kickstarter, etc... I'm not an expert, but those days I believe is simple to assure there are money for a project.

-giovanni

sent from my mobile,
Giovanni Maruzzelli
cell: +39 347 266 56 18

Il 22/Nov/2015 09:12, "ik" <idokan@gmail.com> ha scritto:
Hello,


It seems that every single year there is a new EOL (end of life) of FS version (e.g. 1.4 at this time) and a new version series that replaces it (e.g. 1.6).

The problem is that it's not a simple act to update production servers.
When you have a lot of servers (in different clients and locations) it's even harder.

Many products, including Linux, and even Asterisk have LTS versions, and newer releases versions.
The new releases has new features and way to do stuff, but the LTS get bug fixes and are stable for long period of time (usually 5 years).

What does it take to have LTS version with FS, that the new releases will not stop, but EOL will be much longer for some of it's versions?

Are there any plans for such things?
How we as a community can help?


Ido

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