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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. Skype will still be kicking. by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  2. 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.

  3. 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 tsa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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!

    2. Re:For those of us ignoring Skype... by Malc · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:For those of us ignoring Skype... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    4. 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.

  4. 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