Skype Publishes the Source to Its Super-Wideband Codec SILK

Daniel Berg, Skype’s Chief Technology Officer recently announced that Skype had published the source code to implement its superwide-band SILK audio codec and submitted it to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for standardization. The source to SILKis available under a three-clause BSD license. Skype originally announced SILK at the Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in 2009.

In his post, Skype releases source code for SILK super wideband audio codec – the details, Dan York from Voxeo explains the standards submission in greater detail. Jim Courtney provides a history of SILK in his post Skype’s SILK Codec: Working Towards Adoption as a Standard on his Voice 2.0 World blog.

While the source code to SILK has a liberal BSD license, it can only be used freely for non-commercial use. The license states: “Skype Limited hereby separately grants to you a license under its patents to use this software for internal evaluation and testing purposes only. This license expressly excludes use of this software for distribution or use in any commercial product or any commercial or production use whatsoever.”

Ben Gross