Today at Astricon 2008, Mark Spencer (from Digium) and Stefan Öberg (Vice President and General Manager of Telecom for Skype) dropped the bomb.

“Skype for Asterisk”

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(Here is the cool looking pin distributed after the keynote speech)

The new module for Asterisk will be commercially licensed. The binary module provided by Skype will be wrapped with open source Asterisk code. The licensing will be similar to G729 licensing, it is per channel. You can attach multiple Skype users and handle calls in Asterisk accordingly. The calls to/from Skype users will be free as usual. And of course you can use your Skype Out credits for calling PSTN lines.

They are starting a new beta program you can signup for at http://www.astricon.net/skype. After gathering forms submitted from there, they’ll go into private beta.

I already submitted my application, hopefully it will be chosen 🙂

This is very exciting news. Here is the pictures from the demo call Mark and Stefan made at the keynote:

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