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Skype's Legal Situation Clears
chill writes "Skype's co-founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, have agreed to transfer ownership of the remaining Skype technology that eBay didn't own, paving the way for eBay to complete its sale of a majority stake in Skype to an investor consortium. In exchange, Friis and Zennstrom will join the investor consortium and obtain a 14 percent stake in Skype. The other consortium partners, led by Silver Lake, will own a 56 percent stake in Skype, and eBay will hold on to 30 percent, eBay said Friday."
Shouldn't this situation be a huge strike against Meg Whitman's senate run? No one understood why she bought Skype, it never worked out for them, and she didn't even negotiate the sale properly.
That mess cleaned up much easier than I expected.
I don't think it's Meg's fault that the contract lawyers screwed up royally here. You hire lawyers because no mortal is going to be able to tell what is actually transferred. If Meg knew she was buying, well, nothing then I would agree with you that it should count against her - but remember that eBay had to be told what the original owners actually owned.
Otherwise eBay has not really been run into the ground like other companies have been, I'd say she's done about as well as could be expected apart from the whole skype thing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And that's a generally good idea. The amount of people using Skype is considerable, so just owning and running it should provide a goodwill in the general public for any company that's involved. That doesn't mean that the brand is worth a humongous amount of money, just that it's worth a decent amount of money.
The bad side with Skype is that it seems to be rather bloated these days occupying a rather large amount of memory in our computers.
It's the #3 application in memory consumption on my machine. Considering the services it's offering that is a bit high.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
so Skypetastic! This will ease the fears a lot of Skype users, who used it as their primary phone, had.
For those of us who've been largely ignoring Skype since it's proprietary and there are open alternatives (namely SIP)...
What's the upshot of all this? Skype announced recently that they're planning to open source stuff. Now the tech is going to be owned by a consortium. Does this mean that skype is moving towards being an open, non-proprietary solution?
Bullshit legal controversy created as a negotiating tactic is resolved by negotiations in which everyone gets varying slices of the pie. Shocking!
The main difficulty I've had in this brief saga is figuring out if there was some way I could root against everyone involved simultaneously.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Just today, I was told that PRC's gov't can monitor Skype conversations, ie, IF one side is the Chinese variation, namely: "Tom Skype" (sp?).
Are variations like that one in the deal? Would they be open sourced?
(Surprisingly, plain, vanilla Skype can be used in RoC (Taiwan)... can it solve the invasion of privacy in PRC...? Anybody here know?(
These two guys must be rolling around the floor in delerium! They get paid billions for their software by eBay, and then when eBay sells it off, they get paid billions again. F'n sweet deal for them! These guys lawyers are genius.
On Win XP the (silly) skype plugin made Firefox crash several times a day. Skype never asked whether I wanted the plugin.
Good place for old versions
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...