Post the end of the long standing legal war, eBay's way for the sale of the majority Skype shares has been cleared. Co-founders of the popular voice chat client, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have given the nod to transfer-ship of the stake they currently hold over to eBay, making it the majority holder and making it possible for the company to sell its major stake hold to an investor consortium.

In exchange for handing over the complete ownership to eBay, Skype cofounders will join the investor consortium and get a 14% stake in Skype, while the other partners, led by Silver Lake, will own a 56% stake and eBay itself will continue to hold 30% of the total stakes. Since Skype hit the internet 6 years ago, it has been much popular and has a current registered customer base of about 520 million users.

The web service is free to use for Skype-to-Skype video, voice or text chatting. Lately, however, Skype has been facing some tough competition from other similar services, especially from Google Inc's Google Voice. The Skype deal is not subject to any financing conditions and is expected to close by the end of the current year's fourth quarter.