Ebay to buy Skype?

The Wall Street Journal reported today that EBay is in talks to buy the Luxembourg-based Skype, whose software allows Internet users to speak to each other for free. The acquisition would cost $2 billion to $3 billion, the paper said, citing people familiar with the talks.

Skype has held discussions with other potential purchasers including News Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., the Journal said. The talks with EBay are at a sensitive stage and may still collapse, the newspaper said.

Interesting, I heard there had been discussions, but I didn’t know Microsoft had been one of the potential buyers! Back to Skype being sold: I don’t know what to think about it yet, as far as I know eBay is not considered to be an evil company, yet you never know what they’ll do with the software…

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Skype is my favourite VoIP program at this moment, but we might have to start looking at other (open source) alternatives like the Gizmo Project and the new OpenWengo, for we never now what the future might bring.