Skype and Trixbox

At the moment, not really. Two products in beta are Skype for Asterisk(SFA) and Skype for SIP(SFS) and when released should be the cleanest way to interconnect with Skype.
Connecting to Skype with Asterisk is only half the problem. The other half consists of business concerns. There is a good read about the differences between SFA and SFS plus a good example of the business concerns at http://blogs.digium.com/2009/03/26/the-rumors-of-our-death/

Also, the FreePBX team is an active participant in the SFA beta program and there will some demonstration and discussion at the next Open Telephony Training Program. See link in my sig for more info on that.

Have a look on Nerd Vittles, Ward did something with running the Skype client on PiaF a few weeks back.

works fine for inbound and outbound calls...

Their manual is pretty decent too.

Skype to SIP from Skype is working well. We are testing it here. It should be released soon.

Ward, if you're going to troll, please try a little harder.

http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/trunk/CHANGES

Ward,

As you know, Digium has always had a two-fold mission. First and foremost, we're primary the sponsor of open-source Asterisk, and we take this responsibility very seriously. Second, we're a for-profit company that tries to provide as much hardware, software, services, support, training, and turn-key solutions based around Asterisk as we reasonably can. The basic premise has always been to use the profits from the for-profit side and use them to fund further development on the open-source side.

Your post seems to imply two things: first, that Asterisk development is only done by Digium; second, that all of our development has turned commercial. Let me attempt to address both points.

On the first point, please understand that while Digium provides a lot of resources towards the development of Asterisk (more on this in a minute), the community at large puts forth a tremendous effort as well. I remember when Asterisk 1.4.0 was released that Kevin Fleming said that more than half the new features came from developers outside of Digium. That's a great thing, and something we continue to encourage. Frankly, we don't want to be the only ones working on Asterisk. We respect and admire anyone who takes the time to make Asterisk better and then work with the lead developers (some of whom work for Digium, some of whom do not) to get the code ready for inclusion in Asterisk.

Regarding the second point, I think it's misleading to say that development has shifted away from open source to commercial software. If anything, Digium has put *more* resources into open source Asterisk, while at the same time worked on commercial projects such as Skype for Asterisk and Fax for Asterisk. I would think that from our actions it would be easy to see that this is indeed the case. Anyone who wants to can see just how much effort we put into open source Asterisk, as the development is done in an extremely open and transparent manner. Look at the Subversion commit logs.... look at the Asterisk development mailing list.... look at the Review Board.... look at the bug (and feature!) tracker. All four show exactly what effort we've made (and will continue to make) towards open source Asterisk.

That being said, let's look at the commercial software for a second. We do put resources into commercial offerings for Asterisk as explain above, as we believe there's a market for these types of products. Any way you measure it (whether you measure it in man-hours, salaries for developers, etc.) the commercial software ends up being a drop in the bucket compared to the amount we spend on the development of open source Asterisk. It should be obvious that in order for us to be able to afford to spend the resources we do on open source Asterisk development, we have to have revenue from a combination of hardware and software products. And to answer your final jab... Yes, there are free and open source equivalents to many of our commercial products -- which is great! I am personally very happy to see that the market for Asterisk-based and Asterisk-related products has grown to the point where there are lots of options to choose from. If anything, that gives you the flexibility to get the job done in a variety of ways, and to me flexibility is key.

There can be more then one solution to a problem and different solutions work better for different people. Skype is a closed source company that uses a proprietary closed source codec so any code that attaches to them must be closed source. The biggest advantage of Skype for Asterisk is more than just calling. It opens up the whole Skype API to Asterisk. At some point I should be able to have a BLF light on my phone that responds to the presence of a Skype user. Now that is worth paying a nominal one time fee per port for.

hrm.. Andrew, first and foremost, I commend you on your response in this forum, to each their own is very appropriate.

Ward, thank you, you've given me the motivation for a new slogan:

"Trixbox.org -- Where kids come to throw rocks in glass houses"

-Joel

I was part of the VUC last week where Gizmos lead dude was discussing skype and there was a sense of universal wtf when he mentioned the price model. Now granted I have not seen the Digium pricing model but they seem to like the $10 channel thing at least with g729 and their t38fax deal. If skype pushes out this same price it is 10% of the cost. What needs to be remembered is in a commercial deployment you may not be able to get away with hacks you may need a commercial driver to make things happen. I remember my college came to my linux instructor and asked for a printed copy of all of his software. he had to print out 1500 copies of the GPL 1 copy for each app... Some times in the corporate world you just have to do things a certain way. I personally dont get the skype thing at all but since it is the new hotness my guess is we will see dozens more ways to do things but in the end you need to ensure compliance with the EULA for all components and sometimes it is faster to pay $10/channel then to do the leg work.