Ekiga

» see ekiga.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i had ekiga on a linux box at university, back when it was still called gnomemeeting. the calls that actually mattered in turkey went through msn messenger anyway, so it mostly sat there as a thing i had installed and rarely opened. still, if you were running gnome in the mid 2000s and you wanted voice and video over the internet, this was the client that came with the desktop.

it started as a graduation thesis. damien sandras wanted a netmeeting clone for linux and built one, first under the gnomemeeting name around the turn of the millennium. it spoke sip and h.323, which meant it could talk to standard voip gear and to microsoft netmeeting both. in january 2006 the project took the name ekiga, after an old word for the way villages in cameroon used to signal across distance.

for a while it had a real place. ekiga was the default voip client in ubuntu, which put it on plenty of desktops that never went looking for it, mine among them. that lasted until october 2009, when ubuntu swapped it out for empathy. after that it was a program you had to choose on purpose, and fewer and fewer people did.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the pitch was simple enough. free software voice and video calling for linux, with open protocols and no account with anyone required. you pointed it at a sip provider or another ekiga user and you talked. for an engineer that was the appealing part, it was plumbing you could see all the way through instead of a black box owned by one company.

the trouble was that the people i actually wanted to call were not on sip. they were on msn, and later on skype, which hid all the same plumbing behind something your mother could install. ekiga was correct and skype was easy, and easy won that decade almost everywhere.

~ the long tail ~

ekiga did not get shut down so much as quietly abandoned. the last stable release, 4.0.1, came out in february 2013, and after that development slowed to nothing. in february 2021 the gnome project archived the code repository because no one was touching it, which is about as formal as a death gets for a volunteer open source program. by 2024 it was listed plainly as no longer maintained. the protocols it spoke are still everywhere. the app that spoke them for the linux desktop just stopped.

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