[Asterisk-Dev] A crazy idea... Skype channel in Asterisk

[Benjamin on Asterisk Mailing Lists]

On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 10:40:52 +1300, Matt Riddell
<matt.riddell at sineapps.com> wrote:
> Let us all know how your communications with the Skype Team go.  I'd
> probably weight the conversation in the direction of "we want to allow
> people to use skype at work from their telephone" - as if we are going
> to send all of our outgoing calls via skypeout!  :-)  That'd probably
> help sway them a little.  :-)

Matt, I think you are kidding yourself. The reason why Skype are doing
what they are doing is precisely to establish a monopoly over all
access into their service and not allow any alternatives.

Anything short of Digium handing over all rights in Asterisk to Skype,
they are not going to sway.

Skype is another wannabe Microsoft in the making and we should be
extremely careful. On the one hand, we have an overheated debate
whether or not the BSD license is ethical enough for GPL developers to
be considered tolerable, on the other we are getting excited about
flirting with a company that is as monopolistic and by extension anti
open source as Skype, second only to Microsoft.

If Skype were to make a public statement that they are going to open
up their protocol together with a clear time line attached, I am all
for it.

But anything falling short of that, I say, Skype deserves total
boycott and an anti-Skype information campaign along the lines of
groklaw that tells people why they should avoid it like the plague and
why their business model is a poison pill for their customers. We
don't need yet another telephone monopoly. We don't need yet another
Microsoft.

Instead of wasting our time giving Skype even more profilation, we
better spend more time on lobbying manufacturers to support IAX and
work on making IAX an IETF standard.

Support IAX, not Skype for Skye is the darkness and IAX is the light.

rgds
benjk

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