[superkuh]

That is an interesting perception of history. What it looked like legally was p2p was working great and skype was massively rising in popularity. But the US federal government could not stand encrypted peer to peer communications. So they told their good friends over at eBay to buy the company. eBay messed it up and only bought the license for the name and not the actual code and p2p backend. Things continued working well for a while. But the feds still weren't happy. So they had their other friends at Microsoft actually purchase the technology and then immediately destroy it and switch to a centralized model.

You can read the story at: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/09/skype...

>For the second time, Zennström and Friis cashed in on selling Skype. That's because, instead of giving eBay the critical base technology that kept Skype going (the P2P system known as "Global Index"), Zennström's and Friis's company Joltid still owned it—they simply licensed it to Skype. The whole situation devolved into threats of litigation until a 2009 settlement gave Zennström and Friis a chunk of Skype ownership, which made them even more money when Microsoft bought the company.