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:

For the few that liked my blog and, after a couple of months of silence, thought that I was dead… well I am alive and kicked (no that’s not a typo; I know it should be “kicking”, but the reality is that I feel like I’ve been kicked in my back). What happened… well, a lot of work and, finally, a two-week holiday in Brittany kept me out of the real World. And, now that I am back, I am taking a look around. A number of new interesting news items stand out from the rest.

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?