Update: March 12th, 2007: The 2.1 RC1 is officially out. Go get it

With voice and video calls, file transfer capability and support for almost every instant messaging system on the planet, Wengophone candidates itself as the main free software competitor to Skype. With the 2.0 release, a pretty unstable, beta quality release, they failed the first attempt. What about the second?

The final 2.0 release of Wengophone was out on December without fanfare… fortunately. In fact, it is more beta quality than production. Now people at OpenWengo are going to show us soon that they are actually able to provide the Free Software community with a state-of-the-art, production quality IP phone

Late last Friday Dave Neary (whose name you may recall from the GIMP team, but that’s another story) posted on the OpenWengo Blog about the upcoming 2.1 release that may see the light this month:

In recent weeks, the team has been making great progress towards a stable release - we’ve fixed some long-standing major problems with sound under Linux thanks to Ludovico Cavedon and Mathieu Stute, and the overall quality of the application has improved in leaps and bounds thanks to the usability work of Aurélien Gateau and Tristan Blancbrude. […] And of course, everyone has worked on improving the stability of the application with bug fixes - hundreds in this release cycle, including many crashers.

and

we will now be shipping a first pre-release next week, and aiming to stabilise on something we’re happy with a few weeks afterwards.

As always, testers are welcome. Get on board and help the community get a great application in its hands.

And, of course, expect a new article on the subject