According to sources close to the situation, Index Ventures and Michelangelo Volpi are out of the deal to buy Skype–and their lawsuit-loving nemeses, the founders of the Internet telephony service, are in.

Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis had sued Index and partner Michelangelo Volpi via tech companies they control, Joltid and Joost.

The pair had already been in a legal battle over software licensing issues with eBay (EBAY), the company that had sold Skype to in 2005.

They then accused Index and Volpi, employing a reputation-bashing style, of using confidential information as part of a consortium bid to acquire a large chunk of Skype.

Volpi had been Joost’s CEO.

Volpi and Index fired back in court filings and both sides armed themselves with powerful PR guns.

Ironically, Index was only a small part of the group that won the deal to acquire Skype from eBay recently.

News of the serious settlement talks was reported earlier this week by GigaOm’s Om Malik.

The New York Times’s Brad Stone also added significantly to the story about the settlement today, noting the Skype founders would be getting a stake and that Index “is most likely withdrawing from the deal.”

Well, most likely now means certainly for Index, sources told me, and the London-based venture firm that bid for Skype has to bid that deal goodbye.

More details to come, but it’s sure proof that the legal system, such as it was used, works.

In a front page article Sunday, New York Times writer Gary Rivlin drags out that old Silicon Valley chestnut about how hard it to is be just a plain old millionaire when everyone else around you has all those hundreds of millions and–worse!–billions.

I always enjoy Rivlin’s work and even spent a lovely few weeks with him and also Po Bronson on a lecture/debate scheme hatched by our Random House editor called the “Bleeding Edge” book tour in the summer 1999. (Here’s a quick recap: I thought the Internet was underhyped at the time and Rivlin did not, while Bronson dreamily sold more books than both of us combined.)

But it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine anyone–even in the gold rush days of the Web–not being happy with several million in the bank.

Notes Rivlin: “…Those with a few million dollars often see their accumulated wealth as puny, a reflection of their modest status in the new Gilded Age, when hundreds of thousands of people have accumulated much vaster fortunes…”

Oh, good heavens.

But Rivlin did manage to get his interview subjects to say appalling things, such as calling tech work the “Silicon Valley salt mines” (um, the food is a bit better and there are no whips and chains I have ever seen except by personal preference).

My personal favorite was a quote from Match.com founder Gary Kremen, who apparently without irony declared, “You’re nobody here at $10 million.”

At this, I can only quote the poet Emily Dickinson:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog.
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”

SPOILER ALERT! HARRY POTTER IS FAKE STEVE JOBS!

Speaking of nobody we knew until just now–the Times’ Brad Stone also managed to finally out the creator of the popular Fake Steve Jobs blog. As it turns out, it is not our own John Paczkowski, but Daniel Lyons (pictured here), a senior editor at Forbes magazine.

While some will care more than others about Stone’s identifying the snarkaholic FSJ (Owen, stop crying now), it’s, of course, about the need to sell a book. In this case, Lyons’s “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody,” coming out in the fall.

In a post Sunday, Lyons asked for suggestions for a new verb for Stone’s first name, and then suggested himself: “To bust a fellow filthy hack without mercy and spoil the fun for everyone, in a quest for personal aggrandizement.”

Yes, just like Harry Potter spoilers on the Web! In fact, the Harry-Potter-as-middle-aged-man-looking Lyons would know all about that kind of thing.

MEMO TO MITT: THE KIDS LOVE BOTH SNOWMEN AND THE WEB

And Mitt Romney needs to get over himself, after he viciously attacked the snowman named Billiam. The frozen questioner was posing a pretty good question about global warming in the YouTube/CNN presidential debates recently completed with Democratic presidential candidates.

The GOP wannabes were supposed to do the digital debate in September. But that has been stymied so far when the former Massachusetts governor said a video question from a snowman was undignified, noting, “I don’t know that it makes sense to have people running for president answering questions posed by snowmen.”

Given snowmen have the most to suffer from the climate heating up, I say: Who better!?!

In all seriousness, the Jon-Stewart-tone of the Web is something all the candidates had better get used to. In fact, years hence, queries from snowmen are going to look tame by comparison.

Here’s a Dow Jones Online video on the topic with the chilly question from Billiam: