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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."
eBay paid $2.6 Billion for a dinky little 8MB program, and don't even bother to make sure they got everything?
Wow.
1. Provide a good service, a tool, a format.
2. Make it cheap.
3. Wait 'til everyone uses it because it was cheap.
4. Jack up the price.
5. Profit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why would the founders of Skype be threatening to revoke the licensing agreement? What is their side?
And why would eBay pay billions of dollars for something without some guarantee that they'd be able to run it for a while?
This is like a super-sized version the story about the music industry claiming that it's ridiculous that people would think they could forever listen to their DRM music.
On an individual level, people allow themselves to be screwed for a few dollars at a time, just to be able to listen to the music but - paying more than 2 billion for most of something without a contract ensuring that it's not a total waste of money? Wow.
Didn't we just have this a few years ago... oh no, that was SCO forgetting to actually buy UNIX from Novell. I wonder how many other companies will turn out not to own the software they think they own?
"Ha ha"
proprietary code. what else would you expect?
Up until 3.0 Ekiga did suck dick, I agree. And prior to Ekiga the previous GnomeMeeting worked fine. Ekiga has only been sucking between 2.0 up until 3.0. If you haven't tried it lately I recommend the later versions. Good news is that it's a thriving project with constant updates, just look at the changelogs for the 3.2.X series alone. Whatever it is it's completely free and while it has sucked dick at certain times at least it will never let its users to get it up the ass.
I am the lawn!
I used to communicate with my wife when she was out of town on business. The fortune 500 co she worked for had no problem letting her install Skype on her laptop, so it worked for both of us - free computer to computer calls when she was in Turkey, Argentina, Hong Kong, etc. Our biggest problem was the time zone difference.
Then about a year ago the company's IT department decided that Skype was "bad", and disabled it on all company laptops. My solution? An ubuntu live CD and ekiga. Now we can communicate again when she's away.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
On a related note: there used to be this nice open source skype-alternative (using SIP and all that) called openwengo, but i cant find it anymore. the company also offered a flash based SIP client (wengovisio), and a flash-based teleconferencing thing (wengomeetings), but i cant find any of them anymore. quite a pity.
a little side-rant: the person that designed the SIP protocol in such an incredibly NAT-unfriendly manner should be drawn and quartered. I know there are work-arounds, but i blame this NAT-unfriendliness for the rise of skype, and now we're stuck with that nonstandard closed protocol crap. I think it was the glorious idea of incorporating the IP addresses inside the SIP packets, or something like that. sigh.
on a related note: 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. And what protocol is Google using for their video-chat in gmail?
I guess they'll have to make a negative outcome rating on the seller, and attempt to get resolution through the.....oh, wait....then skype will just neg them back and we already know how the "resolution" process favors the sellers. I guess eBay is just out of luck. What a shame.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
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.