Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[AVee]

On Tuesday 25 September 2007 17:51, Dani Anon wrote:
> On 9/25/07, AVee <openmoko-comunity at avee.org> wrote:
> >
> > I'll use commercial app if they are worth the money. But i really don't
> > see how someone developing a non-free (both in speech as in beer) should
> > get their toolkit for free. When you expect people to pay for *your*
> > software you should not be suprised when you have to pay for a toolkit
> > yourself. The SDK appears to cost 146 euro, that should be an affordable
> > investment for any commercial developer.
>
> Yep, but there's this undeniable fact that having 0 entry cost invites
> a whole new class of developers that you wouldn't have otherwise. I
> think we could perfectly choose QTopia and just handicap commercial
> developers, either of the options is better than having two options.

I'm a profesional software developer, but I have never done any serious 
embedded development. I've seen a whole bunch of language, as such I will 
just use what comes along. Learning another yet another language or toolkit 
doesn't scare me, I do that all the time. 
However, I'll always pick the most clean, simple and well documented toolkit. 
If I'm to write software *for fun*, it better be fun. If the toolkit is too 
hard to use, badly designed, badly documented or simply taking too much time 
to learn I'll go and do someting else. There are dozens of projects out there 
and I've got enough ideas for about 5 livetimes of programming. As a 
developer, I'd pick Qtopia anytime.

As a user, I'd like to see the NEO1973 as the ultimate GPS handheld, the 
ultimate smartphone and the ultimate PDA. To that end it simply *must* run a 
lot of software with little or no effort. You can talk for hours 
about 'inefficient', 'free', 'overhead' and whatever, but I just want view 
the PDF file in my email, use a *proper* webbrowser and run VNC. Most Linux 
applications use X, so if thats what it takes, make the thing run X apps. As 
a user, I definately want X. And if I were porting existing applications, I'd 
want X as well.

So I think it is a good thing to have two options, isn't that what Open Source 
is about, the freedom to use what suits you best? 

AVee

-- 
Beware of low-flying butterflies.