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."
Re:Wait a minute... (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, 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.
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.
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/skype_as_we_know_it_may_not_exist_much_longer_ebay.php [readwriteweb.com]
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you have a legal team making a good enough contract and the buyers legal team is not good enough to catch it. There should be no problem at all.... There is absolutely nothing to stop you from selling your business with a clause like "You pay me a shitload of money but I keep all the business rights" if the buyer is ignorant to sign that deal.
All I can say to eBay is.... Next time get a better legal team :-) This time... just suck it up
Mind you this hammers in all the pro's of IP-laws and software patents and all the terrible thing associated with open source :-D
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:3, Interesting)
They should open-source skype, then they will at least get lots of good publicity.
Re:Ekiga (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dupe? Oh, no, different company... (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?
Nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No problem, there ar Open Source apps. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
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: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?
Re:No problem, there ar Open Source apps. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's all a ploy to buy Skype on the cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:1, Interesting)
An ebay auction requires two (or more) parties to communicate to work out the details of the transaction and/or ask questions before the transaction. Most of this is done through PayPal and/or good old fashion email. Skype is a tool that allows two (or more) parties to communicate. Better communication between buyers and sellers will increase the likelihood of a sale and/or increase the number of interested parties, thus driving up the price of a single auctioned item. That's the relationship, it makes a lot of sense. Why eBay didn't actually DO ANYTHING with it is the bizarre move.
switch to open protocols/source (Score:3, Interesting)
This would be a good time for Skype to switch to open source and open protocols. They make their money on providing landline access and voicemail, so why do they even bother making all this proprietary stuff?
Re:Old bait-and-switch (Score:1, Interesting)
"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."
I don't use VOIP at all, but a year or two ago when I looked at SIPphone, I thought they had conference calling by enabling a single number to be dialed in by anyone and all callers would all be linked up. Didn't sound very secure but I didn't look into the details.
I did a quick Google and SIPphone has a press release from May 17, 2004 about enabling or starting to enable conference calling.
So I'm not sure what this "big advantage" is. I've even read MS had conference calling in their pseudo-VOIP app (which I've forgotten the name of).
Personally, I've never understood why anyone uses Skype. Seems a bunch of idiot users drove the adoption of the system, much like AOL Instant Messaging, a popular system that was adopted by the technically insufficient masses.
Re:It's all a ploy to buy Skype on the cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
GPLed code in Skype client (Score:2, Interesting)
One of my good friends was involved with development of the Skype code base a number of years ago. He mentioned on several occasions that they had to take "healthy chunks" of GPLed code and "safely integrate"(slightly modify) it in order to create what's the core of the codec and protocol handling in the Skype client now. He's been stressing about that at times and I have no reason to doubt him. Hopefully someone will take legal action against Skype at one point and dig up what they are hiding. On the other hand, SIP based VoIP has become so popular lately that Skype may not be around for long anyway.