  Since its decovery during the late 90's, the dimming of distant SN Ia
apparent luminosity has been mostly ascribed to the influence of a mysterious
dark energy component. Based upon the cosmological "principle" hypothesis, this
interpretation has given rise to the "concordance" model, developed in the
context of a Friedmann-Lemaitre cosmology. However, a caveat of this reasoning
is that the cosmological "principle" derives from a philosophical Copernican
assumption and has never been tested. Furthermore, a weakness of its
conclusion, i. e., the existence of a negative-pressure fluid or a cosmological
constant, is that it would have profound implications for the current theories
of physics. This is why we have proposed a more conservative explanation,
ascribing the departure of the observed universe from an Einstein-de Sitter
model to the influence of inhomogeneities. This idea has been independently
developed by other authors and further enlarged to the reproduction of
different cosmological data. We review here the main proposals which has been
made along these lines of though and present some prospects for future
developments.
