Digium purchased by Microsoft, Asterisk will not be free and will work under Windows

April 1, 2012.
Huntsville, Alabama.

Today it became known that the company Digium, engaged in the support and development of free software for telephony Asterisk, was absorbed by Microsoft.

This is the second “telephone” absorption of the giant - the first was Skype, bought for 8.53 billion US dollars. The amount of the transaction for the acquisition of Digium has not yet been disclosed, but from reliable sources it became known that the amount of the transaction exceeds that given for Skype one and a half times.
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Former millionaire Mark Spencer, who became a billionaire and the second richest man on earth after Bill Gates, said the following:

“I am very happy that my new friend Billy shares my passion in the field of telephony. I also respect his courageous decision to roll out the development of Lync and rewrite Asterisk under the Windows platform, anyway, it never worked normally under Linux. Well, I take this opportunity to thank all Asterisk users, wish them success and say good-by the money I got from Easter, I bought Easter Island, which is in the Pacific Ocean, and I intend to actively engage in my second passion — piloting the aircraft. "

Bill Gates, founder and former president of Microsoft, reported
also very interesting information:

“We should admit that the decision to stop supporting the Skype channel in Asterisk was our big mistake (our chief technology officer who made this decision was already dismissed). Therefore, I want to apologize to the Asterisk multi-million user community, and I promise the soonest return of chan_skype.
There is another good news. Everyone knows that Switchvox is the only good interface to Asterisk, but it is paid. Therefore, we built in the Windows 8 kernel the management of Asterisk servers, and this option will be included in the standard Windows license.

As for our own Lync unified communications system, we simply tried to copy Switchvox , but we failed. Therefore, the absorption of Skype and Digium is our last chance to jump into the last car of the outgoing train of revolution in telephony. And yes, Asterisk and the systems based on it turned out to be the future of telephony, that’s obvious. ”

It also became known that the new Digium phones, announced a little earlier, are running Windows Phone 8, which explains the fact that these will be the first desktop SIP phones with support for JavaScript and C # and that will work directly with Active Directory.