Announced during the keynote speech at Astricon today, Digum|Asterisk and Skype have collaborated to create an official Skype channel driver for Asterisk.

From the article:

Digium(R), creator and primary developer of Asterisk(R), the leading open source telephony platform, and Skype(TM), the leading global Internet communications company, today announced the beta version of Skype For Asterisk, which will allow the integration of Skype functionality into Digium’s Asterisk software and enable customers to make, receive and transfer Skype calls from within their Asterisk phone systems.

It seems Skype will connect into Asterisk much like G.729. Licenses will be sold on a per channel basis and there will be an ‘at arms length’ connection into the proprietary Skype binary object, with only the glue components being open-sourced.

This is only possible due to Mark Spencer’s (and later Digium’s) diligence in making sure Asterisk is able to provide the dual licensing situation.

This is yet another example of how a for-profit business and an open source project can co-exist as a completely valid business model.

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