Skype may be shut down!

Just browsing around on the internet, and i come up against this!

eBay, the owner of Skype since the 2005 purchase, has recently announced that due to a licensing disagreement with the founders of Skype

, it may have no other option than to shut down the application.

Skype was founded by two Danish entrepreneurs, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, and purchased by eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion. However, the purchase executed at that time did not include a core component of the VoIP service that powers the Skype application, and this technology had to be licensed by eBay from the founders over the past few years.

The two founders of Skype have recently decided to stop licensing the technology to eBay, and Joltid (the company under which Niklas and Janus are licensing the crucial component), is now being sued by eBay.

If eBay loses in court, it announced that it will most likely be forced to shut down Skype. The alternative is for eBay to develop its own component, but "may not be successful, may result in loss of functionality or customers even if successful, and will in any event be expensive" as eBay put it.

The English court set the trial for June of next year, making it difficult for eBay to push Skype as an individual company on the stock exchange floor, like it was intending to this year.