Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Dani Anon]

thomas.cooksey at bt.com wrote:
>Fantastic news! What works? Looking at the youtube videos, it appears
that the phone, SMS, bluetooth & power management are all working? Can
you actually place and recieve calls?
>
>I'm sure OpenMoko development will continue, but a good question is
why? I don't really want to start a flame war, but I do think the
question should raised. Why spend so much effort creating yet another
GTK+ based framework? What would happen if all the people working on
OpenMoko focused their efforts on improving Qtopia on the neo instead?
Surely we'd get a fast, stable and functional phone stack a lot
quicker?
>
>
>Cheers,
>
>Tom


You are absolutely right, that question needs to be answered or I'm
starting to se the Linux on the desktop epic fail all over again. I
posted some design suggestions a couple of days ago, I was told to
check the new openmoko version and I was going to but now I've
discovered this issue about qtopia I'm gonna have to wait to see what
platform gets more traction. Just like the QT/GTK problem on the
desktop we are heading into a long term fragmentation that won't go
away:

- I've worked with QT and it's clearly superior and I'm willing to bet
it's energetically more efficient since it doesn't have the X overhead
(can anybody measure? this is very important).
- But QT is not free (as in beer) for commercial usage and I'm sure
the openmoko leadership doesn't want to discourage people from
starting commercial ventures on openmoko, and neither should we,
because it's interesting that we have that kind of choice.

So, we really need a word from the openmoko leadership, please, step
in and tell us that you will focus on providing the same kind of
platform that qtopia provides, so we can bet on the more free (but
currently technically inferior) openmoko option, otherwise there's not
reason for us to use openmoko and then we'll have a platform
"locked-in" by qt (for commercial usage) or a fragmented scenario. And
this is very damaging, it means half of the developers are no working
in openmoko programs. And no, "choice is good" doesn't apply to
everything, that's why we have standards so stop repeating that
dangerous fallacy.