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Comments: 282 + - News: Licensing Dispute Threatens Future of Skype on Friday July 31 2009, @03:53AM
Posted
by
timothy
on Friday July 31 2009, @03:53AM
from the it-puts-the-lotion-on-the-remote-kill-switch dept.
from the it-puts-the-lotion-on-the-remote-kill-switch dept.
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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."
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Wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because large companies usually try to expand to new areas too. For example see Virgin Group [wikipedia.org] and even Microsoft, who are doing hardware (and xbox) even if their core business is in Operating Systems.
You dont always need a direct connection between a parent company and the one bought - They can continue to operate like they have, which is even more true when you're buying an existing company.
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Funny)
This is the year of the Vista desktop!
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no reason that a parent company and a bought company have be in related fields. However, it is common that they are. For example, eBay's auction and payment companies. Microsoft's OS and game consoles. Nintendo's game consoles and toys.
The primary reason is that the parent companies assets, including human, are more aligned to fill the needs of the smaller company. eBay and Paypal was a perfect merge for Paypal, and now they effectively get twice the money per auction after forcing their eBay users to offer Paypal. When Microsoft started making Xboxes, they already had most of the operating system, which is a non-negligible part of a console, and more MS employees would be able to take apart and build a computer than say, the employees of a bank. Nintendo has a name which helps them sell toys.
Sometimes, the smaller company can fill a need of a larger company. Perhaps an airline company will buy a computer retailer right before a major IT upgrade, and they will effectively have a discount.
eBay and Skype fulfill none of the examples above and was truly a bizarre move.
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's NOT that they didn't want to contact each other.
eBay couldn't figure out, once they examined the potential fraud angle, how to keep the buyer and seller from colluding to terminate auctions, and conduct the sale privately - without eBay getting the fee.
This was one of the many scenarios they already faced in text communications - and is highly monitored. Voice - especially SkyPe voice - was harder to track, capture and analyze for ToS violations and fraud. This problem remains unsolved.
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Interesting)
eBay buying Skype doesn't make sense. Compare it to Nokia buying Trolltech, maps companies, opening up Symbian with their own money and even starting to enhance their love-hate J2ME virtual machine.
All makes sense if you think about them, in long term strategy and expanding to new markets and I speak about billions here. Billions spent to make things free and even allowing el cheapo Chinese manufacturers have a real OS on their cell phones and I can easily figure why. On eBay case, I can't.
If Amazon purchased Skype, it would make absolute sense but not eBay. Amazon had their "expand to new horizons" since the beginning, remember how people laughed at them when they enabled competitors to advertise on their own pages? That was ages ago. Remember S3 first launch?
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They should open-source skype, then they will at least get lots of good publicity.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
On each login session, Skype generates a session key from 192 random bits. The session key is encrypted with the hard-coded login server's 1536-bit RSA key to form an encrypted session key. Skype also generates a 1024-bit private/public RSA key pair. An MD5 hash of a concatenation of the user name, constant string ("\nSkyper\n") and password is used as a shared secret with the login server. The plain session key is hashed into a 256-bit AES key that is used to encrypt the session's public RSA key and the shared secret. The encrypted session key and the AES encrypted value are sent to the login server.
I would love if they broke all of those. Nevermind that the entire Skype protocol is decentralized already, which is a security risk already because you get random packets from random people using Skype.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_protocol [wikipedia.org]
Dumb AC troll.
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Insightful)
which turns out to be security by obscurity. ;)
any security analyst can tell you how much this is bullshit
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you explain what part of this is "security by obscurity"?
My guess would be the "closed source" part, thinking it's stopping people from finding bugs in the code.
Hint: there's a difference between design and code. You quoted the design, and assumed that since the design is secure, that automatically translates to the code being secure too.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They got $2.6 Billion for a dinky little 8MB program, and still aren't happy?
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, if you're spending $1 million a day, that $2.6 Billion is only going to last 2600 days which is only about seven years.* You need to make sure your elder years will be good aswell.
(* This calculation doesn't take into account one time purchases like houses, cars, airplanes, some nice island near hawaii)
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Interesting)
They obviously did not think that one through very well. The article reads like they bought everything except the protocol, audio codec, or encryption algorithm (one or more of the three - the article isn't detailed enough to say which) - something which stops any replacement they create from being backwards compatible with any other versions of Skype. From that alone, it gives me the impression this is a patent issue, not a copyright issue. Perhaps we can "con" a large company into not supporting software patents out of this mess? ;-)
I also wonder what the potential liability here is, given that portions of Skype are a paid service.
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Informative)
Looking at the Skype founders' company website [joltid.com], they license three different products/technologies: PeerEnabler, PeerCache, and Global Index.
In their words:
They also explicitly state that Global Index is used in Skype.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
In other words, they sell filesharing software? Quick, anyone tell the RIAA! :-)
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Funny)
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Old bait-and-switch (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Provide a good service, a tool, a format.
2. Make it cheap.
3. Wait 'til everyone uses it because it was cheap.
4. Jack up the price.
5. Profit.
Worse than bait-and-switch (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Provide a good service, a tool, a format.
2. Make it cheap.
3. Wait 'til everyone uses it because it was cheap.
4. Jack up the price.
5. Profit.
eBay paid $2.6B for Skype, so I think the handful of people that created it made a (ridiculous) profit. eBay bought Skype and let the founders keep the rights to part of the software which is amazingly stupid IMHO. TFA doesn't even say why Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis revoked the license, but after getting $2.6B they better have a damn good reason. This blog seems to imply the founders want to buy Skype back. [1]
[1] Preview didn't show the line, so just in case:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sk [readwriteweb.com]
Re:Old bait-and-switch (Score:5, Interesting)
Does not work in case of skype you always can use google voice talk (which works better btw. skype is inferior) or directly SIP!
One of Skype's big advantages is conference calling (and now, desktop sharing as well). I don't think either Google Talk nor any SIP providers I know do that. Ekiga would seem to be the nearest open alternative to Skype. Odd how the "downloads" page on ekiga.org makes no mention of their Windows version, which according to their wiki (where a Win32 download link appears), appears to be released almost in parallel to the Linux versions. Oh well, I'll mail them about that.
Parent
Re:Old bait-and-switch (Score:5, Informative)
Conferencing works on every serious SIP system, and has done since long before skype was even popular (and definately long before it supported any such features).
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Something is missing here (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would the founders of Skype be threatening to revoke the licensing agreement? What is their side?
And why would eBay pay billions of dollars for something without some guarantee that they'd be able to run it for a while?
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.
Re:Something is missing here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Ideal time to make it use open standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Dupe? Oh, no, different company... (Score:5, Funny)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Your story is an exceptionally good analogy, except for the fact that SCO never developed Unix nor had any relationship with IBM, while the software that is the topic of the FTA was developed and sold to eBay by the very same people who are now revoking the license. And it seems eBay admits to those points in a SEC filing. BTW, this is the main point of the story.
On topic -- can eBay really be that stupid?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Also, don't forget that RIM were nearly at the point of having to close down Blackberry wireless operations [cnet.com] in the US a couple of years go for very similar reasons.
a nelson moment (Score:5, Insightful)
"Ha ha"
proprietary code. what else would you expect?
These aren't good people... (Score:4, Informative)
Remember that before they started Skype, the founders of Skype created KaZaA, notorious for its immense crapfest of malware [wikipedia.org]. I'm not at all surprised that they're trying to screw over eBay now.
Of course, not that eBay is much better...
Oovoo (Score:3, Informative)
I sometimes use Oovoo instead of skype, as it can do 3-way video calling for free, and more-way calls if one of you has a paid account. It's not quite as good as Skype for 2-way calls, but the 3-way video is nice to have.
Nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
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A few years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to communicate with my wife when she was out of town on business. The fortune 500 co she worked for had no problem letting her install Skype on her laptop, so it worked for both of us - free computer to computer calls when she was in Turkey, Argentina, Hong Kong, etc. Our biggest problem was the time zone difference.
Then about a year ago the company's IT department decided that Skype was "bad", and disabled it on all company laptops. My solution? An ubuntu live CD and ekiga. Now we can communicate again when she's away.
i feel a reimplementation comming on (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except for the fact, that this would require all their 50 million users to upgrade their Skype software. Because Ebay can't make an compability version of the prodotol due to patents.
(And many of those skype installs are on mobile phones, where an upgrade may not be that easy for most users).
Whatever happened to Wengo? (Score:5, Interesting)
a little side-rant: the person that designed the SIP protocol in such an incredibly NAT-unfriendly manner should be drawn and quartered. I know there are work-arounds, but i blame this NAT-unfriendliness for the rise of skype, and now we're stuck with that nonstandard closed protocol crap. I think it was the glorious idea of incorporating the IP addresses inside the SIP packets, or something like that. sigh.
on a related note: 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. And what protocol is Google using for their video-chat in gmail?
Re:Whatever happened to Wengo? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Whatever happened to Wengo? (Score:4, Informative)
It became qutecom. [qutecom.org]
The code is sitll there, but the project hasn't seen many updates recently, and development has slowed down to almost nothing. :-(
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eBay got a bad deal? (Score:5, Funny)
I guess they'll have to make a negative outcome rating on the seller, and attempt to get resolution through the.....oh, wait....then skype will just neg them back and we already know how the "resolution" process favors the sellers. I guess eBay is just out of luck. What a shame.
The reason for Skype (Score:5, Informative)
At the time of the Skype purchase, eBay was desperately trying to break into the China market against TaoBao (or something like that) that was beating them. Meg The CEO, in yet another display of ineptitude, after a long business trip (a.k.a vacation) in China got a hold of a rumor that Chinese auctioneers preferred to talk on the phone rather than email via anonymous email (which is how eBay was able to keep potential gray market auctions low) and that Skype was going to allow the buyer and seller a better route of communication and allow eBay to dominate China. How no major executive foresaw that once the buyer and seller could communicate by Skype then would just close the auction and negotiate offline and avoid seller fees; everyone but the powers that be saw this coming.
The asking price of 2.8 billion + 2 billion (or something ridiculous like that) if they met some internal goals (it was as insane as it sounds and at the time every blog, publication, news source was laughing outloud). Needless to say Skype missed their goal gloriously, did not get 2 billion and at that time it came out that in yet another stroke of brilliance by Meg the underlying technology was not part of the 2.8 billion. The only people who benefited were the founders of Skype who must still be laughing.
If I am buying a chat program for 2.8 billion I better be getting everything... anyhow, all this is public knowledge and a sad chronicle of how incompetent CEO can keep making mistake after mistake and be seen as successful because the company was hugely profitable despite their best efforts. For the record I sold my stock in eBay as soon as I read about this mess and it was at 44$usd at the time, it fell to almost 20$usd when Skype was reported as a write-down (a.k.a. complete loss) in the 10Q and never quite recovered.
Re:Just replace the code (Score:4, Insightful)
Brave claim you make here since you haven't seen the code.
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Re:Ekiga (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ekiga (Score:4, Informative)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ekiga#Encrypt%20your%20calls [ubuntu.com]
Right.
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Re:No problem, there ar Open Source apps. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ekiga for MacOS X? (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a mac client: http://xmeeting.sourceforge.net/pages/index.php [sourceforge.net]
Thanks, but you know it doesn't sound stellar when the last item in their "news" is dated 2007-07-03... :-/
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