As you may have read, Digium announced a sharp rise in Asterisk downloads for 2008 registering in a whopping 1.5 million downloads for 2008. That got me thinking just how does Asterisk & AsteriskNOW compare with Fonality's trixbox CE distro? Arguably trixbox CE is the either the #1 or the #2 downloaded Asterisk-based distribution. But are they #1 or #2? Let the Fonality vs. Digium download battle commence...First, we head to Sourceforge, which tracks trixbox CE downloads and see how trixbox CE stacks up against Digium's claimed 1.5 million downloads.
| Date (UTC) | Downloads | Bytes Served |
| Dec 2008 * | 18,050 | 6.8 TB |
| Nov 2008 | 31,000 | 12.2 TB |
| Oct 2008 | 35,187 | 15.6 TB |
| Sep 2008 | 19,449 | 9.6 TB |
| Aug 2008 | 6,948 | 3.3 TB |
| Jul 2008 | 8,329 | 3.7 TB |
| Jun 2008 | 19,993 | 9.3 TB |
| May 2008 | 21,822 | 13.3 TB |
| Apr 2008 | 18,238 | 11.0 TB |
| Mar 2008 | 41,085 | 25.2 TB |
| Feb 2008 | 27,725 | 16.9 TB |
| Jan 2008 | 43,942 | 26.4 TB |
| Total | 291,768 | 153.8 TB |
* Partial data: End of month not yet reached.
Taking a daily average, the final 2008 total downloads should be ~292,587.
That's 292,587 (year-end estimate) vs. 1.5 million (so far) for Asterisk. So it would appear Digium's Asterisk beats Fonality trixbox CE by over 5X!
Not so fast though. I was pretty sure the Digium download numbers were for Asterisk and AsteriskNOW combined. AsteriskNOW and trixbox CE are more comparable to each other, since both have FreePBX installed, both are .iso bootable CDs, they're both nearly plug-and-play distros, etc.
So to be fair to Fonality's trixbox CE, I should compare AsteriskNOW to trixbox CE. I contacted Digium's Bill Miller, VP, Product Management, and asked him for the breakdown in their 1.5 million downloads.
I told Bill my intentions of making a side-by-side download comparison, but also pointed out I had to wear my skepticism hat:
"The only caveat to any comparison I make between Asterisk/AsteriskNOW & trixbox CE is that you host your own downloads - not a 3rd party like Sourceforge. So there I have to have a healthy level of skepticism for any numbers Digium cites. Nevertheless, I think it'll be an interesting discussion if I post these comparative stats in an article."
Bill explained, "19.8% are AsteriskNOW. We are close to par with them.". Indeed at 19.8% of 1.5 million equates to 297,000 downloads or roughly 6500 more than trixbox CE. Although, I said above I had to wear my skepticism hat, I think the numbers Bill gave me sound credible.
I would agree with Bill that there are indeed more trixbox CE boxes in production, but it does appear from these numbers that Digium's AsteriskNOW is closing fast in production numbers and already exceeding Fonality's trixbox CE in downloads.
To be perfectly frank, I'm a little bit surprised AsteriskNOW has surpassed trixbox CE, since I'm sure even Digium would admit that trixbox CE, which was formerly Asterisk@Home, had a huge head start and developed a strong community (see trixbox forums and the sheer number of posts & threads). In fact, Bill Miller mentioned the head start in our conversation. Still, the number of downloads between the two is very close and they are neck-in-neck.
Of course, if you add in regular Asterisk downloads it's no contest. Digium wins by a landslide.
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You only have to take a look around the forums and mailing lists, where are all these asterisk now users ?
I smell BS
How completely unprofessional. You take data that Fonality has no problem with being public information and compare it with word-of-mouth data from Digium's spokesperson and present it as fact with absolutely nothing to back it up. You also are comparing ISO downloads to asterisk version downloads which trixbox CE does through the package manager and not even asking them about those numbers. As far as we know, those numbers could surpass Digium's numbers. This is a huge pile of Digium Fan-boy garbage unless you are comparing numbers that include all of Fonality's data.
How is reporting the facts unprofessional? I said I had to have a healthy level of skepticism for any numbers Digium cites, since they don't use a 3rd party download site like Sourceforge. The job of any journalist is the report the facts as best he/she knows them. I made a point to stress that Digium doesn't use a third party site, so they could make up a number. I let the reader decide if Digium is an honorable corporation.
I haven't seen anything to indicate that Digium has been sneaky or deceptive, so my opinion is the number they gave is accurate. But some may come to a different conclusion.
You do bring up a good point about comparing Asterisk version downloads vs. trixbox .iso downloads. However, I tried to get an accurate number from Digium on their AsteriskNOW downloads so it compares apples-to-apples and they told me that 19.8% of the 1.5 million total was for AsteriskNOW. As I mentioned in the article, this equates to 297,000 downloads or roughly 6500 more for AsteriskNOW than trixbox CE.
My article is the closest assessment I've seen comparing trixbox CE vs. AsteriskNOW. If you have a more objective measurement, I'm open to suggestions. I'll even update this post if a more accurate measurement & comparison can be done.
As for being a Digium fan-boy, that's pretty funny, because I've gotten emails over the years calling me a Fonality fan-boy for my plethora of coverage of Fonality (http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/tag/fonality), including many interviews with Fonality CEO Chris Lyman. Guess I can't please everyone all of the time.
I could care less one way or the other about how many downloads it has now. What will show is how many downloads and installs there will be when the FreePBX version is out of Beta. I have been using trixbox CE for 3 years and would personally love to see Digium put a good deal of time making it a trixbox CE killer. Fonality time after time has screwed FreePBX and it's community.
If anyone from Digium reads this. Please spend time making it asthetically and graphically beautiful. I have lost clients even to CE because they dont like how it looks. They preferred how TB Pro looked yuck. So layout is very important to the clients which in the end is all that I care about. I have over 50 CE installs and would gladly move to AsteriskNOW if it looks highly professional.
M