Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, have approached several private equity firms and are pooling their own substantial resources to make a bid for the Internet calling service, say several people with knowledge of their plans.
NY Times

Ebay bought the company back in 2005 for $2.6 billion which later increased to $3.1bn after some bonus payouts. However since the purchase, Skype has not really done anything major (barring a few releases for previously unsupported platforms (iphone, blackberry)). It certainly has not done anything that would not have been accomplished without Ebay. Also Ebay execs have agreeded that Skype has little ties to it’s core business and apart from adding some call the seller buttons within the site, integration has been pretty lack lustre.

CEO of Skype has also signaled that he would be willing to sell Skype for the right price, a mere $1.7bn according to analysts. There are some issues with selling Skype however, a pending legal action between Ebay and Skype over the intellectual property of the core tech behind the service may well put off other bidders:

In a regulatory filing April 1, eBay disclosed that Joltid, a company founded by Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis, had terminated eBay’s license to Joltid’s peer-to-peer technologies, which are at the heart of Skype’s calling service.
NY Times

There was speculation that Ebay may sell Skype to another large corporation but with Google just releasing Google Voice, people are probably quite reluctant to enter such a market now, and as Google was the losing bidder in the initial sale they most likely wouldn’t be interested. 

If it does go through however then Skype would have a serious uphill struggle to keep it’s growth going,  it needs to move beyond cheap calling and expand it’s services and market. We have already seen signs of Skype’s growth slowing. During the 4th quarter of 2008 Skype:

• had sales of $145 million for the quarter, up 26 percent year-over-year, but only $2 million higher than the prior quarter.
• added 35 million new users to stand at more than 405 million registered users.
• saw SkypeOut minutes go to 2.6 billion from 2.2 billion in the third quarter of 2008.
• saw Skype-to-Skype minutes go to 20.5 billion from 16.5 billion in the third quarter of 2008.
  GIGAOM 

To sell an additional 400 million Skype-Out minutes but only have $2 million in actual sales is pretty poor and at the same time used FREE Skype to Skype minutes were increased by 4 billion in 1 quarter. In a year on year performance Skype’s figures equate to “a 47 percent rise in the number of users generated a roughly 47 percent increase in usage of its free service” GigaOM

So as you can see the company may still be growing albeit at a much slower rate, but it’s not making much money for all the growth!

A

UPDATE: To add to all this speculation it was just announced that StumbleUpon who were also bought by Ebay have had the founders buy it back. Even more fuel for the fire that Ebay is looking to sell off it’s baggage to generate cash and focus on it’s core product!!!