Could Skype be in Danger?
The millions of users who depend on Skype as their alternate to a landline phone may have something to worry about. The creators of Skype and its new owner eBay are in a little bit of a tiff right now. eBay purchased Skype way back in 2005 but its creators Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis still retained some of the rights to the VoIP’s peer to peer technology. Now they want to pull the peer-to-peer software they own from Skype, which would pretty much render it useless. To prevent this, eBay filed a lawsuit against Niklas and Janus and is working on a new software that can run Skype without the original peer-to-peer client. But not only is eBay’s new software expensive; they also admit that it is unlikely to work. Of course, shutting down Skype is not even an option eBay would consider, but with the way things are looking it’s probably best to start finding alternatives to Skype.
Fortunately there are many other free VoIP providers that can provide the same voice chat and video chat features, like Oovoo, Google Voice, TeamSpeak, and Fring, to name a few. Still, I hope it doesn’t come to the death of Skype.