A group of private equity investors that agreed a deal to buy Skype from Ebay look set to reach a settlement with the founders of the internet telephony service, which would leave then with a stake in the business, people familiar with the situation said.

The deal would end an increasingly bitter legal dispute between the two sides over the ownership of the software that powers Skype, which was the key stumbling block to the completion of the $1.9bn deal .

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the Skype founders who sold it to Ebay in 2005, are expected to join the buy-out group led by Silver Lake, the private equity firm, which is taking a 65 per cent stake in the company. It was not clear last night how big a stake the founders would take, but it is likely to be substantially higher than the 5 per cent holding that they were understood to have been offered earlier this year.

Silver Lake, Andreesen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan investment board, the co-investors in the consortium, are likely to have their share of the business diluted substantially. "Everyone is going to take a haircut on this," said one person familiar with the negotiations.

The Skype founders will be putting up a significant amount of cash for the stake, and will have a presence on the Skype board.

Index Ventures, which was to take a 3 per cent stake in Skype, will leave the consortium. People familiar with the situation said it no longer made sense for Index to participate in the deal if its holding was diluted by the inclusion of the Skype founders. It may also have been difficult for Index to work with the Skype founders, who launched a number of lawsuits against the company, including one against Mike Volpi, a partner at Index. Mr Volpi was close to Mr Zennstrom and Mr Friis, working with them on a separate venture.

The dispute has centred on the peer-to-peer technology that is used to power the Skype service. When Ebay bought the internet telephony service in 2005 it did not buy rights to this technology, but merely licensed it. The rights were retained by Joltid, an intellectual property company set up by Mr Zennstrom and Mr Friis. Joltid later claimed that Ebay had violated its licence terms and demanded compensation.

The settlement is expec-ted to involve Joltid passing the intellectual property rights to Skype, and settling all the lawsuits.