GTK vs QTopia vs Android - (was: Re: Android needsapplications) (will be: new vision for openmoko)

Lorn Potter lpotter at trolltech.com
Sun Nov 18 20:29:04 CET 2007


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




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