[Bradford] PHP developers and the only FOSS billing platform

[Moanin]

Hi All,

Are there any PHP developers out there with a little free time? Also web 
developers. The only FOSS billing platform for web hosting is 
struggling. So herewith a plea for some volunteers to help out. I am 
also exploring possibilities to raise some funds so at least a part 
time, hope beyond hope a full time, member of staff could be employed to 
coordinate the effort and pull it all together. Please read on.

The lines to read between are unclear for the early part of the story, 
so this may turn out to be only partially true. BoxBilling went through 
some crises and the management, so far as can be seen from the available 
reading matter, folded as an entity.

One of them did stay on, with a plea for support from remaining 
customers and community. Simultaneously the whole project became 
community owned, driven and free to use. This last bit, and what 
follows, I know to be true.

There has been little activity for a long period, about eighteen months 
to two years at a guess, and the project was stuck in PHP 5.? until as 
recently as a couple of weeks ago, after a month or two of intense 
effort from a couple of people. It is now at testing stage with PHP 7.3 
and there is talk of rapidly moving on to 7.4, the current version.

All of this development is occurring on github. The BoxBilling web site 
is badly neglected. It even went down altogether for a while. No thought 
looks to have been given to future licensing (the one thing I may be at 
least partly qualified to help with, possibly even taking a lead).

Added to all that, there are very few modules available to patch the 
platform with the many suppliers out there. These suppliers are web 
hosts, domain name registrars, SSL cert main resellers, to which could 
be added various other facilities such as secure email and VPN providers.

There is scope already for module builders to be properly paid as these 
could be resold to web hosts, resellers, perhaps even with subsidies 
from the main suppliers, of which feelers to date have shown some will 
some won't.

So, if anybody is interested please respond to me by replying to the 
email address this one came from or approach the small, merry, band of 
developers directly at github, https://github.com/boxbilling

Thanks, all, for reading through. Hopefully it wasn't too long but 
enough to give you a good inkling of what it's all about.

Cheers,

Mike

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"Moanin" is a track wrtitten by Charles Mingus, first public recording 
was on his album "Blues and Roots", 1959.