Looking for VOIP on the cheap, don’t invest too much in SKYPE

I’ve seen this pop up a couple times on the interwebs so I figured I’d give it a read.  Well, it appears when eBay bought SKYPE, that free VOIP service that everyone uses, it looks like they forgot to cross their T’s and dot their I’s.  Seems they basically bought the name and only “licensed” the technology, just like you “license” your anti-virus software.  So their equilivant of your “Subscription Expired” popup you get from Norton each year is popping up in their legal department.

What does this mean for you?  The short story is Skype may go away and if you own a Skype phone or have Skype credit it may become useless.  So if you bought stuff already, oh well, if you haven’t don’t.  Wait and see what happens.  Maybe eBay will “license” the technology again and all will be saved, for a little while.

Finally, and I can’t post without offering an alternative, sign up for Google voice and Gizmo5 (http://google.com/voice and http://gizmo5.com) and you can replace Skype.  You’ll be able to call land lines, Skype users, and other Gizmo5 users.  It’s the solution I am using now and best of all it’s free too.

Reference: Skype As We Know It May Not Exist Much Longer, eBay Says