UPDATE: Skype has issued an official statement about the end of Skype For Asterisk.
Word breaking out right now from multiple sources is that Skype has killed off the Skype for Asterisk product developed in conjunction with Digium. In an email sent by Digium product management that was subsequently posted on web sites (including Digium’s), the company says (my emphasis added):
Skype for Asterisk was developed by Digium in cooperation with Skype. It includes proprietary software from Skype that allows Asterisk to join the Skype network as a native client. Skype has decided not to renew the agreement that permits us to package this proprietary software. Therefore Skype for Asterisk sales and activations will cease on July 26, 2011.
Skype will apparently continue to support the SFA software for an additional two years until July 26, 2013.
The Promise…
Skype For Asterisk was announced with great fanfare back at Astricon in 2008. I wrote about how it might tear down some of the walls of Skype’s proprietary walled garden and posted multiple follow-up posts, including a detailed dive into Asterisk interconnection and how Skype could help with that.
The beautiful part was that Skype For Asterisk allowed two-way communication into the Skype cloud… allowing you to make calls to Skype recipients in ways that you couldn’t with other options.
There was certainly great hope within the open source sides of the VOIP world that Skype For Asterisk, a.k.a. “SFA”, would go far to connect the world of Skype to the larger world of SIP and IP communications.
In September 2009, Skype announced on their blog that Skype For Asterisk was available to all and there were ongoing posts on other sites about SFA usage. (Including Tim Panton’s cool integration of Google Wave, Skype and Asterisk)
Sign of the Microsoft Era?
Now obviously we’re not privy to the contract negotiations between Digium and Skype. Perhaps it is simply a case of the two companies not agreeing to terms. Maybe Skype wanted more money… maybe Skype didn’t want to do the support for SFA… maybe it didn’t hit Skype’s revenue targets… maybe it’s just cleaning up Skype’s various business units before the Microsoft acquisition…
… or maybe it is a sign of the new Microsoft era at Skype, even though the deal has not formally closed. That is certainly the prevailing sentiment on Twitter right now.
Let’s hope not… but time will tell.
Fred Posner perhaps stated this concern best in his blog post this afternoon:
Digium announced today the official end of Skype for Asterisk– ending anyone’s dream of a more friendly, open, Skype under Microsoft.
UPDATE – May 25, 2011: Tim Panton, a developer who was among the early users of Skype For Asterisk and has been involved in the Asterisk and VoIP community for years, wrote a thoughtful post: The long slow death of Skype for Asterisk. Tim notes the apparent tension between Skype and Digium from the early days of the product and offers the opinion that Skype probably just had no intention to renew the agreement in any event. Tim’s post is well worth a read as he is someone who actually worked with the SFA product a great bit.
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Yes, it does appear to be the first salvo. But I suspect that there is a more insidious motive. Skype is based on a proprietary peer-to-peer protocol. There have been some attempts at reverse engineering it and what has been found is chilling – Skype, without asking for express permission, uses all the computers it can find to optimize the routing of traffic. The more powerful the computer and the greater the capacity the internet connection, the higher the system is elevated in the rankings.
So consider the following scenario: Microsoft releases a new version of Skype, suitably branded and with some added bells and whistles. The proprietary communications layer is “enhanced” and by stealth your computers are now part of the Microsoft cloud, using your processing power and bandwidth to support what in effect is a zombie network doing whatever is required to M$ bidding.
Skype under Microsoft will probably absorb Messenger and other interfaces. No need for asterisk
Peter, I don’t disagree with your general premise about Skype (and now Microsoft) utilizing the user’s resources to minimize operating costs and maximized profits. However you do state your claim about this use being “chilling” and “without permission” in a highly provocative way. True Skype doesn’t openly advertise to new users on installation that they may “assist the network’s health” in this way, but it’s hardly a secret to any person casually familiar with technology, a P2P user, or someone reading FAQ’s on Skype’s site.
Back in 2004 (a year after launch) several papers confirmed this shared resource network model. One example is:
“A super node is an ordinary host’s end-point on the Skype network. Any node with a public IP address having sufficient CPU, memory, and network bandwidth is a candidate to become a super node” – http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0412/0412017.pdf
But even back in 2003 (the year of launch) Skype’s official website stated:
“P2P network technologies such as FastTrack (used by KaZaA) would be suitable for decentralizing this, if not for the fact that these networks are fragmented in nature – a search does not reach all nodes in the network. Clearly, in order to deliver high quality telephony with the lowest possible costs, a third generation of P2P technology (“3G P2P”), or Global Index (GI) was a necessary development and represents yet another paradigm shift in the notion of scaleable networks. The Global Index technology is a multi-tiered network where super-nodes communicate in such a way that every node in the network has full knowledge of all available users and resources with minimal latency.”
There are mentions of this in a 2003 Skype Official Forum quote – http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=6 – Posting #6 no less.
And then the earliest credible “direct from Skype” public, open description I could find STILL ONLINE was in the Internet Archive from Aug 2004, again only a year after launch, and possibly earlier if records went back far enough:
“Non-firewalled clients and clients on publicly routable IP addresses are able to help NAT’ed nodes to communicate by routing calls.” ….. “Likewise, only proxies with available spare resources are chosen so that the performance for these users is not affected.” – http://web.archive.org/web/20040916201706/http://www.skype.com/products/explained.html