QuteCom (WengoPhone)

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

~ the eulogy ~

Wengo was a French voice-over-IP operator, and in September 2004 it started paying developers to build a softphone it would then give away under the GPL. The first public release came on 25 June 2005 under the name WengoPhone. The strange part of the arrangement was deliberate: an operator was funding a client that spoke plain SIP, which meant it worked perfectly well pointed at any of Wengo's competitors.

What you got was a C++ and Qt application that ran from one source tree on every desktop platform that mattered. It called other SIP users for nothing, called landlines and mobiles for money, sent SMS inside France, did video through FFmpeg, and after version 2.1 could sit in the same window as your MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and Jabber contacts because it borrowed libpurple from Pidgin. There was even a Firefox plug-in, which tells you what year it was.

By 2006 I had TTNet broadband at home, and calling over it meant Skype, because Skype was what everybody installed and it asked nothing of you except an account. QuteCom's entire pitch was the opposite. Bring your own provider, choose it on price rather than on which program it forces you to run. That argument only lands if there is a consumer SIP market to shop in, and in western Europe there was one. That is the part that did not travel.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The community around it was called OpenWengo, and for a while it was one of the more serious free-software projects in France. Version 2.1 was the important one, because it cut the last hard tie to Wengo's own servers and let the client work against any SIP account at all. That turned a promotional tool for one operator into a general-purpose phone.

The clearest sign of what the software was actually for came on 15 May 2008, when osAlliance shipped a branded 2.2 build called kvats, tuned for A1 in Austria. That was the model working as intended. An operator takes the free client, puts its own name on the front, hands it to subscribers, and pays nothing for the engineering. It just never happened often enough to keep a development team fed.

~ the unraveling ~

The limitation list on its own Wikipedia article is longer than the feature list, and it is honest. Encryption existed from version 2.1 but the key exchange was Everbee rather than a standard, so encrypted calls only worked from one QuteCom to another. Video went out as malformed H.263 packets, which broke calls to other videophones, and audio conferences stopped at three people.

Underneath all of that was a harder problem. QuteCom's selling point was interoperability, and the program that had won consumer calling was Skype, which spoke a closed protocol on purpose and could not be interoperated with by anyone. Standing on the open standard is a strong position among developers and a meaningless one to a person who just wants to hear their family.

~ the long tail ~

On 28 January 2008 Wengo signed the project over to its partner MBDSYS, and WengoPhone became QuteCom. The handover press release is still readable in the archive, and it reads like what it was, a sponsor arranging a soft landing on the way out. Version 2.2.1 arrived on 22 June 2011 and then the releases stopped without an announcement, which is how most free-software projects actually end.

The domain went next. Whois puts the transfer at 30 March 2016, and by that July qutecom.com belonged to a broker. Ekiga, the other GPL SIP client of that generation, hung on until 2021 before its own maintainers called it. Neither of them was beaten by a better softphone. The desk phone stopped being a thing anyone pointed software at, and the calls moved into whatever app the person on the other end already had open.

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