"...We also announce the release of the first preview of the next stable release, WengoPhone 2.2 alpha 1. This release is destined for community and packager testing, before a final release supercedes the current 2.1 series..."

The OpenWengo project ceased to exist last November, and all the developers have been laid off. So, is it true that Wengophone is dead and Skype has no other serious competitor? Not quite.

"At last, you can download and use an alpha WengoPhone Firefox extension for GNU/Linux. It has been flagged alpha because, as you may know, GNU/Linux systems are very different from each others, so it's difficult to provide a WengoPhone Firefox extension that works blissfully on most of them. We'd like, by publishing this alpha version, to test WengoPhone Firefox extension for GNU/Linux on the largest number of different GNU/Linux distributions. For this, we'd be pleased that you follow the small set of instructions below, it will greatly help us to publish a stable and robust version soon! ..."

Wengo -- the commercial PSTN-routing SIP provider that is the open source project's parent company -- focused on its Windows builds and essentially skipped over Linux during the 2.0 release cycle. OpenWengo's Linux developers were never satisfied with the stability of the 2.0-series release candidates, so they never incremented the Linux version number to 2.0.

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:

In the closing days of 2007, open source voice-over-IP (VoIP) project WengoPhone found itself without a sponsor. The project's creator and underwriter, Wengo, announced it was halting its support after more than three years of development. Fortunately, longtime contributor MBDSYS offered to take over maintainership of the project, and has begun the transition, setting out a roadmap and reinvigorating the developer base.

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.

Python 3000 (a.k.a. "Py3k", and released as Python 3.0) is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed.

Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 3 is the third alpha release of Ubuntu 7.10, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features. Note: This is still an alpha release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released in October 2007.