Popular VoIP service Skype may be changing hands again, but this time it may be back to a familiar team.

In 2005 Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, sold the service to eBay for a final price of $3.1 billion.  Since then that purchase decision has come into question many times, to the point that eBay had to write off some debt that knocked the price of the comany down to $1.7 billion.

According to Rumors reported by the New York Times, the founders are gathering funds from private equity firms, along with using their considerable fortunes, to attempt to buy the company back from eBay.  Experts are saying that the auction company is looking to sell as they have never found a successful way to ingetrate the service with their core ecommerece aspects.

The reason this is a natural sale is also that Zennstrom and Friis own Joltid,the peer-to-peer architecture that is the heart of Skype. Recently they pulled the license from eBay for undisclosed reasons, but that means that anyone who bought Skype could also find it horribly crippled if they started enforcing this lack of a license.

Considering that Skype now has 405 million registered users compared to the 53 million at the time of the original sale, and that it is also the makers of one of the most popular iPhone apps, and has one coming out for the BlackBerry in May, if the sale price really goes for $2 billion, it seems the original owners would be getting quite the bargain. As for what they might do with it, you could easily imagine further development of the service, and possible integration with their video service, Joost, which might allow people to watch videos together as they talk.

It is easy to imagine that the potential uses for this service are far from tapped out, and back in the right hands of people who know what to do with it, it could become an even bigger service.