Re: GTK vs QTopia vs Android - (was: Re: Android needsapplications) (will be: new vision for openmoko)
From my POV, when people at OpenMoko decided on GTK for its paltform they are giving developers the ability to participate and influence *directly* on its development, and create great apps, both opensource and proprietary, without paying any license fees. The Nokia decision when build the Maemo platform was of the same nature. Qtopia has none of these traits. Look that the pricing is not the most importante issue, its the control over the development of the platform, as the history of Microsoft and IBM roles in the beginning of PCs told us, who controls the software runs the show. I personally prefer the model where the community runs the show, and think that the companies behind OpenMoko and Maemo prefer that no other random company gives the cards on its hardware platform. -- Marcelo Lira dos Santos http://setanta.wordpress.com @CInLUG: http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~cinlug @Ciência Livre: http://www.ciencialivre.pro.br @INdT: http://www.indt.org.br ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: GTK vs QTopia vs Android - (was: Re: Android needsapplications) (will be: new vision for openmoko)
License fees for Qtopia (and Qt) are a pittance compared to the fees of even one engineer for one year for any company Yes I agree with you before you said it: Look that the pricing is not the most importante issue You can influence directly the development of Qtopia very easily. It appears more that you can assist the development than decide its future. I agree that the patent argument is an issue to every company, but these days who isn't violating another company software patent? The security that Qtopia offers over projects like OpenMoko or Maemo is some patent arsenal from Trolltech, or some agreement like the Novell-Microsoft one? If I'm following correctly almost every opensource project should be judged dangerous by the companies. -- Marcelo Lira dos Santos http://setanta.wordpress.com @CInLUG: http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~cinlug @Ciência Livre: http://www.ciencialivre.pro.br @INdT: http://www.indt.org.br ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: GTK vs QTopia vs Android - (was: Re: Android needsapplications) (will be: new vision for openmoko)
Marcelo Lira wrote: From my POV, when people at OpenMoko decided on GTK for its paltform they are giving developers the ability to participate and influence *directly* on its development, and create great apps, both opensource and proprietary, without paying any license fees. The Nokia decision when build the Maemo platform was of the same nature. Qtopia has none of these traits. Look that the pricing is not the most importante issue, its the control over the development of the platform, as the history of Microsoft and IBM roles in the beginning of PCs told us, who controls the software runs the show. I personally prefer the model where the community runs the show, and think that the companies behind OpenMoko and Maemo prefer that no other random company gives the cards on its hardware platform. If you look at the development, both Nokia and Openmoko 'runs the show' and has the last say on their respective platforms, not the community. I would think they would prefer a trusted platform where random developers aren't contributing to possible security and patent issues, one where they could track the code and where it came from more easily. License fees for Qtopia (and Qt) are a pittance compared to the fees of even one engineer for one year for any company (that is for the closed source version), license fees for the GPL version are free. and ISV (Independent Software Vendor) license fees are probably going away. You can influence directly the development of Qtopia very easily. Bug reports/feature requests can be made via Trolltech's bug tracker. Contributing code to Qtopia is really no different than contributing code to FSF/GNU. -- Lorn 'ljp' Potter Software Engineer, Systems Group, MES, Trolltech ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: GTK vs QTopia vs Android - (was: Re: Android needsapplications) (will be: new vision for openmoko)
Marcelo Lira wrote: License fees for Qtopia (and Qt) are a pittance compared to the fees of even one engineer for one year for any company Yes I agree with you before you said it: Look that the pricing is not the most importante issue You can influence directly the development of Qtopia very easily. It appears more that you can assist the development than decide its future. I agree that the patent argument is an issue to every company, but these days who isn't violating another company software patent? The security that Qtopia offers over projects like OpenMoko or Maemo is some patent arsenal from Trolltech, or some agreement like the Novell-Microsoft one? If I'm following correctly almost every opensource project should be judged dangerous by the companies. Trolltech has no patent arsenal, and is against them. http://dot.kde.org/1081772638/ Distributing opensource can be dangerous, especially when audio/video codecs are concerned. Many need to be properly licensed to be distributed. I was speaking of code diligence, and knowing exactly where and when any line of code came from and being able to track it. Trolltech has (opensource) code that cannot be worked on by citizens of certain countries due to export restrictions. -- Lorn 'ljp' Potter Software Engineer, Systems Group, MES, Trolltech ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
RE: GTK vs QTopia vs Android - (was: Re: Android needsapplications) (will be: new vision for openmoko)
Very true. An extremely small amount of actual source code, none of it especially useful, was released with Android. The core libraries, as well as the Dalvik virtual machine, the tools, etc., were only released in binary form. The only sources provided were - the kernel - WebKit - the QEMU-based emulator Google has stated that they won't be making any further releases of code before phones running Android ship, so that seems to be pretty much all we'll see of Android for a year or so. You could get OpenMoko running on the Android emulator relatively easily, but I don't think you'd have nearly that kind of luck running the Android software on FIC hardware. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ross Burton Sent: Friday, November 16, 2007 5:49 AM To: Michael Schmidt Cc: List for OpenMoko community discussion; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: GTK vs QTopia vs Android - (was: Re: Android needsapplications) (will be: new vision for openmoko) On Fri, 2007-11-16 at 14:30 +0100, Michael Schmidt wrote: If I understand it right, the neo phone has now three options for an operating system - the current openmoko GTK operating system - Qtopia from Trolltech - Android linux from google. Last time I looked, the full Android stack wasn't open source. They say it will be, but until it is Android is a closed platform running on Linux. Ross -- OpenedHand Ltd. Unit R Homesdale Business Center / 216-218 Homesdale Road / Bromley / BR1 2QZ / UK Tel: +44 (0)20 8819 6559 Expert Open Source For Consumer Devices - http://o-hand.com/ ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community