Open Source VoIP engine Open Wengo reboots as QuteCom

Having completed transition from it’s original sponsor, Wengo, popular open source VoIP engine Open Wengo has resumed development as QuteCom With MBDSYS as it’s sponsor.

MBDSYS has five developers working on WengoPhone and its underlying libraries, one full-time and four others on a part-time basis. Because its normal line of business often involves contract and customization work with WengoPhone and its components, Lebedev expects taking on management of the project to have little impact on the company’s time.

Re-starting development

In the short term, Lebedev says to expect a new release shortly after CeBIT, which ran last week. That release will be based on the current 2.2.x-series code, and will consist of primarily bug fixes, but will also introduce peer-to-peer presence management — allowing users to relay their present/away status without passing that information through a SIP server.

Another three months down the road, Lebedev hopes to make a more substantial new release, integrating the long-delayed CoIpManager — a single architecture abstracting instant messaging, SIP, and IAX services. That release should also update the app to use Qt 4.4 and WebKit.

After that, Lebedev has no set agenda, but he has a long list of features he and other developers are eager to work on, including additional communications protocols like P2PP, VNC, Phil Zimmermann’s ZRTP encryption, and integration with other open source projects such as Google’s libjingle and Linphone’s mediastreamer2. (from Linux.com)

In February, Lebedev sent an informal roadmap to the developers’ mailing list and solicited comments. He also announced a desire to rename the project to reflect the app’s new life outside of Wengo (and to move away from Wengo’s trademarks).

He eventually decided on the name QuteCom, and has begun to set up bug tracking, mailing lists, and source code repositories at qutecom.org. The Web site is not ready yet, but in the meantime interested users and developers can still access all of the old project resources through openwengo.org.