"Head on over to the OpenWengo developer website to get a sneak peek at what's coming up in the 2.2 release, or get the sources from SVN at https://dev.openwengo.org/svn/openwengo/wengophone-ng/tags/release/2.2/2007-09-24-wengophone-2.2a2/"

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:

Today I installed Skype in Ubuntu 7.04. There can be a number of problems running Skype in Ubuntu. Yet my biggest concern was getting my microphone working.

In response to inquiries regarding a German court's ruling that Skype had breached the GPL, the company told LinuxDevices.com today that it "has not acted improperly." The alleged violation was associated with the method by which Skype "distributed" GPL-licensed source code with a Linux-powered VoIP handset.

"A member of Skype staff posting in the Linux support forum there seems to have taken a course in customer relations from if his responses to criticism of the lack of real world development of the Linux version of Skype, compared to Windows development, are anything to go by."

German district court Munich has convicted Skype of violating the GPL. One of the VoIP telephones sold by Skype run Linux, but the GPL text was not handed out together with the phone, although the GPL requires that.

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?

"It's providential that yesterday's Skype failure [...] happens just as the Free Software Foundation is publishing its final draft of the GNU Affero GPL, and shortly after the release of the much-debated General Public License, Version 3. I think this massive failure in a service beloved and depended on by millions of people around the world will sharpen discussion of these two licenses...

Skype has released a beta version of its VIOP software with video support. Though in beta, it performs very well. Its very easy to install on SUSE, here is a small howto.