links for 2009-07-31

"[Ebay] bought Skype from entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis for $US2.6 billion in 2005, but this did not include a core piece of peer-to-peer communications technology that powers the software." It's hard to fathom how Ebay could have been so stupendously stupid. But the greediness of the original developers is pretty astonishing as well.