Yesterday I suggested that Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are better off letting bygones be bygones, but today the Skype saga got juicier and Mike Volpi is painted as the main culprit.
From GigaOm:
The gist of the lawsuit is that Volpi learned how to modify Joltid’s proprietary software to run on the web without the aid of a peer-to-peer software when he was transitioning Joost from a peer-to-peer service to a web-based Hulu clone. And with this knowledge, he was able to pitch a version of Skype that buyers could take over from eBay while side-stepping ongoing litigation.
(…)
“Volpi and Index lacked the credibility and financial heft to lead a private equity investment consortium to acquire Skype unless and until they advertised their knowledge of the Confidential Information.”
“In a very short time, Volpi burned through a substantial amount of the working capital available to Joost at the time he became CEO. Moreover, he had removed from Joost a significant portion of Joost’s innovating and market-driving technology, leaving Joost to rely on third-party technology products. Volpi’s overall business strategy failed. Moreover, it was a failure that was extremely expensive, with Joost expending tens of millions of dollars of investors’ capital.”
—Volpi is described as “a faithless fidicuary” who “took advantage of the trust and confidence placed in him to steal confidential, highly proprietary information relating to an extremely popular Internet-based technology, as well as other strategic, commercially valuable and sensitive information.” As president and CEO of Joost, Volpi, they claim, had access to info from both Joost and Joltid—including the Global Index P2P software that powers Skype and other Zennstrom-Friis efforts. Joost had the source code; Skype had more limited access—an executable-only code form of GUI. (That’s the license that is being litigated in the UK between eBay and Joltid; Skype’s continued use of the code is the subject of the copyright infringement case.)
and Tech Crunch re: the technical aspect of why Skype could never open up to developers:
A source code version of the GI Software is licensed by Joltid to Joost, allowing Joost to be the first company to successfully deliver television and other video content in real-time over a peer-to-peer network. An executable-only object code form of the GI Software was licensed by Joltid to Skype, a well-known Internet-based company that provides users throughout the world with free or low-cost telephone services over the Internet. Skype did not obtain a license to the GI Software source code, however, and the license it did obtain was terminated based on Skype’s breaches of the license agreement.
This is getting ridiculous. Is there anyone in this saga that doesn’t stink, basically?
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