That's a weird end to a crazy story. 2.5 month trial, completely acquitted. What's the takeaway here? Did HP make some horrible mistake and totally mismanage the acquisition as alleged?
Lynch was convicted in a civil case in the UK in 2022 but the damages have still not been announced yet.
I told them their product didn't really meet any pressing need we had and was a bit expensive so thanks but no thanks. They came back with the proposal that instead of buying the software I could buy (from them) a really expensive NAS and they would throw the indexer in for free and the advantage for me would be that because it was hardware the expenditure could be written off against tax over time as depreciation.
It sounded sketchy so I didn't bite, but in essence they pitched me on the exact fraudulent thing that he was acquitted of.
They were (allegedly) selling expensive disk drives for cost plus and telling investors they were making a software sale which obviously have very different growth characteristics as businesses.
What business ebay, an auctions company, had owning Skype was never explained.
Discussion has mostly disappeared from the internet, but you can still find traces eg https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/31/ebay-in-litigation-with-sk...