Nearly a month ago Steve Sokol announced that Digium is finally providing paid support for the Open Source version of the Asterisk software.

Back in March I did not want to comment on this particular news item. I would let the dust settle before commenting.

What implication will this have for the ecosystem around Asterisk?

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Is the real reason behind the court case between Joltid and eBay why Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis now state that they want to buy back Skype from eBay?

According to The New York Times this is exactly what the founders of Skype now want.

A very interesting fact is that Joltid was in fact founded by Zennström and Friis. I have not had the time to check the facts, but according to various rumors floating around on the Internet, Joltid is still owned by Zennström and Friis.

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I am very excited about Google Voice. Really I am, even tho I have stated on several occasions that Google Voice it not very innovative. For all practical purposes it is just Grand Central re-packaged. Grand Central was closed down for a very long time and reborn as Google Voice, it is a bit disturbing to see how few innovative services Google has put into Grand Central, Version 2.0.

This behaviour is really nothing new from Google (or any other big companies buying smaller fish). A lot of times we see when Google acquire a small company, the crowd goes wild, and more often than not, the services simply disappear and is never seen again.

Can we really trust Google (Voice) for our business use?

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paidContent.org recently ran a piece on the current licensing dispute between eBay (owner of Skype) and Joltid (licensor of the P2P technology Skype uses).

If you did not know, Skype uses Peer-2-Peer technology as their transport medium of voice and video. I will not use this blog posting to go into the technical and juridical issues about how scary Skype can be.

This court case is extremely serious for Skype, just take a look at the SEC fillings. If you are unfamiliar about SEC, it is the watch dog of the US financial system.

What is interesting to take a look at is The Ecosystem that is flourishing around Skype.

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