Lately I’ve been working on an updated version of the comparison between Skype and Wengophone I wrote on June 2006 for Free Software Magazine. While I was working on it, I spotted a number of rather worrying signs:

For several weeks, the OpenWengo community has been keeping embarrassingly quiet.

• No nightly builds: they are stuck at 13085, while sources are far ahead.

• No commits: sure, nightly builds are a commodity, but it looks like no commits have been done for weeks.

• The #openwengo IRC channel is mostly silent. Even the users which used to be chatty (the buildbots) are now quiet.

• Some of the most representative people of the community are unavailable.

This kind of sudden silence can’t be a good sign. If you compared a software project’s health to a person’s, Wengophone doesn’t seem to have any brain activity and no working internal organs.

So, a number of questions arise; the first one is: has Wengo abandoned the community they gave birth to? Also: should we say goodbye to Wengophone?

I hope Wengophone will stay alive and well, with or without Wengo’s funding. Should they give up on the project, I hope a new community will come up and bring a new life to this fantastic piece of software.