The rumors surrounding Skype’s future have been rumbling for moths now, with eBay quite keen to shed the Internet communication software because (as everyone else could already see) it doesn’t sit particularly well with its core auction business.

The New York Times reports that eBay will today announce a deal to sell Skype to a group of private investors that may well include VC company Andreessen Horowitz, which is headed up by Netscape’s co-founder Marc Andreessen. Interestingly, Andreessen is on eBay’s board of directors. Conflict of interest, anyone?

As a backdrop to all this, the founders of Skype (Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis) have mounted a legal challenge over ownership of the peer-to-peer technology used by the software.

We’ll have to wait and see what happens. At least let’s hope that legal wrangles don’t affect Skype’s service.

Via

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3. Niklas Zennstrom steps down as Skype CEO
4. eBay opens selling platform to embedded third party tools
5. Two more convicted for selling pirated software to eBay