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

[Chris Lee]

Benjamin on Asterisk Mailing Lists wrote:
> 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
> 
Where Skype wins customers is ease of use;
IAX still needs a centrally administered server - Asterisk.
If "IAX over peer-to-peer" and "Client plugins" for the popular IM 
products out there were to be produced; Then potential Skype customers 
could decide to use a free and open alternative that works well with 
Asterisk and still have the benefit of just running the configurator and 
being set up.
Naturally a free and open "IAX over peer-to-peer" project is a whole 
project on its own.

Simple example would be you could become part of the IAX peer-to-peer 
network and talk to other named members without ever going near an 
asterisk PBX, however with asterisk PBXs attached you could be using 
asterisk termination/origination and voicemail services etc.
If the peer-to-peer service is well designed finding "services" should 
be easy.

call IAX-peer://+1555555555@freddiestermination-us
freddie gets instructions to set up a call to 555555555 in the US from 
iax-peer user bob id=126547634
He has bob as a signed up paying customer and delivers the call.

The potential advantages of a multiple path peer-to-peer call route are 
interesting, a possible new telephony fabric, increasing the chance of 
packets arriving, and with low latency, on condition they are put 
together and additional packets are dropped.

Of course a way to link IAX-peer addresses with E-num could also be 
useful. What IAX-peer looks after +1555676541? for example.

My two cents worth.

Chris.