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Licensing Dispute Threatens Future of Skype
tomlins writes "eBay is faced with the prospect of having to close down the hugely popular VoIP app Skype due to its reliance on proprietary code still owned by Skype's original founders, who are threatening to pull the plug on the licensing agreement they have with eBay."
Remember that before they started Skype, the founders of Skype created KaZaA, notorious for its immense crapfest of malware. I'm not at all surprised that they're trying to screw over eBay now.
Of course, not that eBay is much better...
Looking at the Skype founders' company website, they license three different products/technologies: PeerEnabler, PeerCache, and Global Index.
In their words:
They also explicitly state that Global Index is used in Skype.
I sometimes use Oovoo instead of skype, as it can do 3-way video calling for free, and more-way calls if one of you has a paid account. It's not quite as good as Skype for 2-way calls, but the 3-way video is nice to have.
Conferencing works on every serious SIP system, and has done since long before skype was even popular (and definately long before it supported any such features).
Except for the fact, that this would require all their 50 million users to upgrade their Skype software. Because Ebay can't make an compability version of the prodotol due to patents.
(And many of those skype installs are on mobile phones, where an upgrade may not be that easy for most users).
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ekiga#Encrypt%20your%20calls
Right.
Exactly. Pick up any Nokia phone with WiFi and there's a SIP client you can use. It's integrated into the rest of the system, and you can set it as the preferred method of calling when there is a WiFi signal. You have the choice of a number of different SIP to POTS gateways, so you can pick whichever one gives the best value for the kind of calling you do.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
the person that designed the SIP protocol in such an incredibly NAT-unfriendly manner should be drawn and quartered
SIP was created in 1996. Widespread deployment of NAT didn't begin until several years later. Back then, everyone thought we'd have moved to IPv6 before v4 addresses became sufficiently scarce that NAT looked like a good idea.
whatever happened to Google's open-source VoIP thingy that incorporated with XMPP/Jabber? I think it was called 'Jingle', but I haven't heard a lot about it since then.
It's still called Jingle. It's been published as a series of XEPs (XMPP Enhancement Proposals; think XMPP-specific RFCs), and anyone can implement it. It has a number of transports (via proxy, in-band, direct connection, STUN) and can be used to negotiate pretty much any stream connection.
And what protocol is Google using for their video-chat in gmail?
Jingle.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Here's a mac client: http://xmeeting.sourceforge.net/pages/index.php
Thanks, but you know it doesn't sound stellar when the last item in their "news" is dated 2007-07-03... :-/
Animoog.org
I think early on, eBay intended to use the Skype platform to give buyers a way to contact the seller without the seller having to expose their real contact number. It still wasn't worth $2.6 billion for this feature.
Can open-source solutions maintain Skype's level of security?
Skype Encryption Stumps German Police
http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSL21173920071122
Expert: Skype calls nearly impossible for NSA to intercept
http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/index.php?p=919
It became qutecom.
The code is sitll there, but the project hasn't seen many updates recently, and development has slowed down to almost nothing. :-(
A little late to post this, but...
I agree with what you're saying except that your Nintendo example is wrong. Nintendo started out as a toy company (well, a card company, then a bunch of other things, then a toy company) and then moved into video games as logical extension (non electric games -> electric games).
just my 2 cents
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
At the time of the Skype purchase, eBay was desperately trying to break into the China market against TaoBao (or something like that) that was beating them. Meg The CEO, in yet another display of ineptitude, after a long business trip (a.k.a vacation) in China got a hold of a rumor that Chinese auctioneers preferred to talk on the phone rather than email via anonymous email (which is how eBay was able to keep potential gray market auctions low) and that Skype was going to allow the buyer and seller a better route of communication and allow eBay to dominate China. How no major executive foresaw that once the buyer and seller could communicate by Skype then would just close the auction and negotiate offline and avoid seller fees; everyone but the powers that be saw this coming.
The asking price of 2.8 billion + 2 billion (or something ridiculous like that) if they met some internal goals (it was as insane as it sounds and at the time every blog, publication, news source was laughing outloud). Needless to say Skype missed their goal gloriously, did not get 2 billion and at that time it came out that in yet another stroke of brilliance by Meg the underlying technology was not part of the 2.8 billion. The only people who benefited were the founders of Skype who must still be laughing.
If I am buying a chat program for 2.8 billion I better be getting everything... anyhow, all this is public knowledge and a sad chronicle of how incompetent CEO can keep making mistake after mistake and be seen as successful because the company was hugely profitable despite their best efforts. For the record I sold my stock in eBay as soon as I read about this mess and it was at 44$usd at the time, it fell to almost 20$usd when Skype was reported as a write-down (a.k.a. complete loss) in the 10Q and never quite recovered.