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

Wait a minute...

[ustolemyname]

eBay paid $2.6 Billion for a dinky little 8MB program, and don't even bother to make sure they got everything?

Wow.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Shaiku]

I've been wondering for a long time why eBay even bought skype. There is no relationship whatsoever and it doesn't come as a surprise to me that they're recently looking to dump it. They paid an outrageous sum, didn't get full rights, and failed to leverage that technology in any way useful to the company. Bizarre move..

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft, who are doing hardware (and xbox) even if their core business is in Operating Systems.

I thought Microsoft was trying to get out of the Operating System business because they couldn't compete with Windows XP.

Re:Something is missing here

[qbast]

Why would the founders of Skype be threatening to revoke the licensing agreement? What is their side?

Isn't it obvious? "Gimme more money!"

And why would eBay pay billions of dollars for something without some guarantee that they'd be able to run it for a while?

Their lawyers allowed themselves to get suckered? There is lesson to all those FUDing about how using open sourced pieces of software makes company vulnerable to legal problems. Guess what? With closed source the problem is the same, only worse - you don't have several widely used and well understood licenses - every company creates its own and every time you sign one you risk your legal team missing some well-hidden minefield.

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.

Wow indeed.

Dupe? Oh, no, different company...

[argent]

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?

Re:Ekiga

[noundi]

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.

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.