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Skype's Legal Situation Clears

Posted by Soulskill on from the everybody-goes-home-happy dept.

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."

8 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Meg Whitman by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

  2. Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    That mess cleaned up much easier than I expected.

  3. Re:Not sure that should be the case. by something_wicked_thi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What makes you think the contract lawyers were so incompetent so as not to notice something like this? My bet is they knew what was up, told the execs and they continued, anyway. It's possible what you say is true, but if I were to bet on who was dumber - an exec-turned-politician, or a random contract lawyer, well, I know which one my money's on.

  4. For those of us ignoring Skype... by CarpetShark · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:For those of us ignoring Skype... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      If you believe that then I don't think you've used Skype on Linux. The Linux client is far behind the windows client and only has one developer working on it, by opening up the UI that will allow the community to fix what ebay doesn't want to put the resources towards. By doing this it's a win, win situation:
      1) The community improves the client and gets a better client because of that
      2) Ebay can stop receiving the same complaints from Linuxs users that they receive over and over.

    2. Re:For those of us ignoring Skype... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      In case you missed it, the newer versions of Pidgin support voice/video via XMPP/GTalk/etc. http://pidgin.im/

      On every platform but Windows.

  5. not much of a surprise by Trepidity · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  6. Re:Skype will still be kicking. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

    More bad sides: Details on the consortium buying Skype:IQT (with precedents) Skype already comes with back door into your system now..
    The question is, what will skype in all its bloated glory be capable of after it is taken off eBays hands? At least eBay had the goal of making money off their investment.
    Open sourcing the Skype linux client also benefits IQT, since Linux skype users are such a small fraction of the market getting them on side only helps increase the network effect for the closed source skype spy client.

    Skype spy client is an extremely poor alternative to an open communication standard with a lively community of compatible talk clients. Unfortunately such a community has not yet materialized. And before you point to SIP clients, please do a little bit of research from "Joe Six pack's" point of view which is: Download and install Skype spy client in three mouse clicks and talk. SIP clients AFAIK are overly complicated to use - and it seems the protocol is built to make sure they stay that way. Sad, just sad.

    .