"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:

GNU Free Call and WebRTC are both building frameworks that stand to make Skype obsolete. Skype has been in the news a lot lately: Microsoft agreed to buy the company, their network has gone down twice recently, and they're threatening to take unspecified action against developers who try to write free software to make calls on their system.

Skype is proprietary software that allows you to make calls over the Internet using your computer. Skype uses decentralized peer-to-peer technologies, so your calls do not go through a central server, but through distributed servers and other users. It uses its own proprietary communication protocol to achieve this.

Free software is definitely going strong in some areas, especially in the server market. However, there are other areas where free software and free protocols have failed. Internet based voice and video communication is one of those areas.

"...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..."

Open the skype put your nick, password, give it sign up and go, you're logged into your Skype, you'll see your contacts and all that stuff, if you have balance you can use skype on your phone,

Still, Linux users really want Skype, so every now and again, another story starts that Skype is going to go open-source. In the latest Skype open-source rumor, it's claimed that "We are happy to be able to inform you that Skype will from now on be part of the open source community."

This is the Skype API Plugin for Pidgin/libpurple/Adium. If you're already running Skype, you can have your Skype contacts displayed with your Pidgin/libpurple/Adium contacts. It is intended as a complete replacement for the Skype user interface, hopefully everything you can do in Skype you can do with this plugin.