Ekiga is the most popular, free VoIP software available. When I asked the Ekiga team for an interview, there was a lot I didn’t know. For example, I had no idea I’d be interviewing quite so many people (coordination was quite a challenge!), and—more importantly—I didn’t know that so much knowledge would have been uncovered. Every single member had something important to say, and the result is an interview that becomes a unique insight into Ekiga, the VoIP world, free software development and team work.

Julien Puydt, Damien Sandras, Matthias Schneider, Yannick Defais, Jan Schampera, These guys know telephony. They were born with a directory in their pockets. This interview is not to be missed. Enjoy.

Many thanks to Gary Richmond for editing this epic interview

I’ve been looking for an SIP program for a long time. Linphone, OpenWengo, and Gizmo all failed to work with my Logitech AK5370 USB microphone (ah, the joys of drivers!). Eventually, after about half a dozen programs, I gave up. Then, out of the blue came Twinkle, a Qt-based VoIP phone.

The word is finally out. It was just a suspicion about a month ago, but it was finally, sadly, confirmed.

The OpenWengo project ceased to exist last November, and all the developers have been laid off. You may want to read the whole thread and see how much sadness there is amongst the developers and the community. All of the developers have to find other jobs, while we, the community, have to find some good alternative VoIP & IM software.

And it’s going to be hard.

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:

On Sunday, August 5, 2007 Bush signed the revised Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) into law, in which the U.S. Congress spinelessly caved in and gave legal authority to the Bush administration to continue to intercept and spy on electronic communications. Then, on Thursday, August 16, 2007 the whole worldwide Skype network goes down. Coincidence? I think if you use Skype, you should now be very, very, concerned about the privacy of your calls and had better start considering using FOSS alternatives.

On March 23rd the OpenWengo project released the second release candidate of their Wengophone, a free software VoIP client with integrated support for SMS, video calls, conferencing, and Instant Messaging for many protocols. So, while they are steadily moving towards the final 2.1 release and I am filing bugs on their trouble ticket system, I had the pleasure of interviewing two of their “frontmen”: Philippe Bernery and Dave Neary.

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?

I have noticed many of our sister free software projects have recently incorporated features commonly associated with Bayonne. Asterisk 1.4, for example, introduces a native scripting language. The excellent community fork of Asterisk, OpenPBX, had planned to use embedded io for this purpose.

I had an interesting conversation with Daniel Olivera from Ututo last week, although he perhaps didn’t perceive it as that. Mostly it involved trying to get some video feeds working from here and Italy on the radio ututo server in Argentina. But from that process I have come to think about how worthwhile it would be to have fully open and anonymous telephone servers.