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."

Comments

These aren't good people...

[supersat]

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...

Re:Wait a minute...

[k33l0r]

Looking at the Skype founders' company website, they license three different products/technologies: PeerEnabler, PeerCache, and Global Index.

In their words:

• PeerEnabler is "a virtual Content Distribution Network"
• PeerCache is "a cache product that enabled network operators to optimize peer-to-peer traffic"
• Global Index is their flagship product and "is the world's most technologically advanced, scalable and field-tested peer-to-peer technology. Global Index creates a self-organizing and self-healing distributed storage, transport and data object management system that does away with the costs of traditional datacenter solutions and enables a range of applications from communications to broadcasting and beyond."

They also explicitly state that Global Index is used in Skype.

Re:Old bait-and-switch

[Tony Hoyle]

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).

Re:Ekiga

[Shikaku]

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ekiga#Encrypt%20your%20calls

Right.

Re:Nice

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Whatever happened to Wengo?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Ekiga for MacOS X?

[Lord Satri]

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... :-/

Re:Whatever happened to Wengo?

[Digana]

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. :-(

The reason for Skype

[achacha]

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.