Licensing Dispute Threatens Future of Skype 282
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."
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...
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.
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.
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).
Re:i feel a reimplementation comming on (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).
Re:Ekiga (Score:4, Informative)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ekiga#Encrypt%20your%20calls [ubuntu.com]
Right.
Re:No problem, there ar Open Source apps. (Score:1, Informative)
Yes you can. Unlike Skype, you're not bound to a central service provider with a dictating price model. You can choose one of the numerous SIP (or IAX, i don't know if Ekiga even supports it) service providers [voip-info.org]. Many of those that I've looked at are local providers, but with decent rates for long distance too. A lot of them are offering pre-paid plans, so it's easy and cheap to try, and you can later upgrade to a flatrate model if you so wish.
Or, you could even set up a gateway service yourself [voip-info.org], if you want to afford the hardware and/or tinker with open software. Or why not a full-blown telephony server like Asterisk [asterisk.org] while you're at it?
True to the free software ideas, you have all the choice you want, the burden is just to review it all and to find something to fit your needs.
Currently, it's all rather open from a security viewpoint as well - but the technology is still young, and hey, it's probably not less secure than skype [heise.de] :)
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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... :-/
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ideal time to make it use open standards (Score:2, Informative)
Can open-source solutions maintain Skype's level of security?
Skype Encryption Stumps German Police
http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSL21173920071122 [reuters.com]
Expert: Skype calls nearly impossible for NSA to intercept
http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/index.php?p=919 [zdnet.com]
Re:These aren't good people... (Score:2, Informative)
The founders of Skype did found KaZaA, but they sold it off before the malware infestation took over.
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. :-(
Re:Whatever happened to Wengo? (Score:1, Informative)
Actually, I think the advantage that the Skype protocol has over SIP is that Skype uses a single IP port for everything, whereas SIP uses multiple ports: One for signalling, one a different one or more for media (RTP).
Skype does not have to get the firewall to open up additional ports, whereas SIP does.
In SIP, this is supposed to be addressed with STUN and ICE, but still doesn't always work.
Jason Fischl recently joined Skype, and I believe his mandate was to integrate SIP into the Skype client. Good news, now skype will suffer, err... I mean can enjoy all the half-audio and no-audio problems of SIP!
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:2, Informative)
I agree with what you're saying except that your Nintendo example is wrong. Nintendo started out as a toy company (well, a card company, then a bunch of other things, then a toy company) and then moved into video games as logical extension (non electric games -> electric games).
just my 2 cents
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.