At the risk of being flamed : State of software

[Paul Eggleton]

Before I start, I will state that I am absolutely *not* suggesting that 
OpenMoko move to Qtopia 4 - I simply wish to respond to some of your points.

On Sun, 26 Aug 2007, Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:
> There was "lot" of stuff for old Qtopia versions (1.5->2.2) but none of
> them can be "just built" for Qtopia4 version

No, you're right, they can't. But I would counter that with the fact that you 
can't just recompile desktop apps for the phone and expect them to be usable. 
I know this is not the point you were making but it is something that is 
quite often touted as a reason for using X on handheld devices.

> (and you do not really want to play with Qtopia <4.x - trust me - I 
> spent over two years with OPIE hacking).  

OK, it's not the best for future development, but some of us are still working 
with Opie and it's not all that bad.

> Forget about syncing PIM data to something other
> then Qtopia4 Desktop (if it exists), 

That's just not true. Do we have a fully working syncing solution for the PIM 
applications we have now in OpenMoko? Is there any reason why an OpenSync 
plugin could not be written for a Qtopia 4 based platform?

> forget about many X11 based applications/games (I know that most of them
> needs to be adapted to small screen but many of them can be just used). 

About the only full applications that can be "just used" are games, and for 
those, if they are SDL based (as many of them are) they will work fine even 
without X. It's important not to forget also that many such games will be 
problematic on the Neo1973 because there are no buttons to speak of.

> For me LGPL is proper license for such device. It allows to write free
> applications which will use any license (all those hackers which you
> listed) AND it allows to write commercial stuff. 

But after you add closed source software, the phone is not totally free 
anymore. Don't you see the conflict there?

> We have GPS on device - how many Linux applications you know which can show
> you maps and route you from one place to another? I know few:
>
> - TomTom Navigator (commercial)
> - Garmin something (commercial)
> - Maemo Mapper (can be un-Hildoned, require network connection for routes)

You could make the same argument about entire mobile phone platforms - there 
hasn't been a fully open one yet so there never will be? If anyone here 
believed that then this project wouldn't have even been started.

Cheers,
Paul