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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."
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.
That is not important. As far as I understand, only parts of the interface will be opened up. The protocul will stay closed, so you can't use in it anything but Skype. I had much rather seen it the other way around. Open protocols and document formats are far more important than open source.
-- Cheers!
I haven't found anything that works as well as Skype. SIP is way down the list in performance. Skype could cope like nothing else when I was living in China calling the West, dealing with high latency and packet loss.
In case you missed it, the newer versions of Pidgin support voice/video via XMPP/GTalk/etc. http://pidgin.im/