Will GTK be used in Openmoko?

[Shachar Shemesh]

Karsten Ensinger wrote:
>
> Sorry if I sound harsh, but I want to make a point.
You are right, that is an excellent excuse.
>
> What part of "free" you have not understand?
Yes, very mature.
>
> YOU are free to do whatever you want regarding using toolkits within
> Openmoko. There WILL GTK as well as QT shipping too.
> And do not blame a mother for loving her children. ;-)
I have a problem with a mother that forces ME to love her children. This 
is not a free software volunteer doing what he wishes, if it's good it 
gets accepted, if not, then not. This is an engineer getting paid with 
(hopefully) what is, in the end, our money. I think asking a company 
that wishes me to be its customer should tolerate me asking it about its 
engineering decisions.
>
> NO ONE promised that Openmoko will deliver a ready to use phone
> developed ENTIRELY ON THEIR OWN. They always stated that they need the
> help of the community to get "user-ready".
And I'm asking them to help me help them. I will add Hebrew support to 
an infrastructure that has the basic support. I will do that on my own 
time, without asking to get paid for it. It is extremely unlikely that I 
will have enough free time to implement a BiDi aware text editor inside 
EFL to support entering SMSes, however. I am not asking anyone to 
implement BiDi. I'm just asking them to make a choice between the 
ALREADY EXISTING toolkits that do.

I'll stress it again. I'm not asking anyone to do development for things 
I need. I'm asking to choose existing, debugged, stable and free 
libraries that make that development easier, not only for me, but for 
many others.

> YOU YOURSELF stated, that this is an easy part, so you have to be an
> experienced developer. Then DO IT.
Without looking at the EFL code, adding BiDi display support should take 
about two hours. No big deal by any stretch, and yes, I will do it. My 
problem is exactly with the area Carsten has dismissed, which is text 
input. I do not think it as trivial a part of the phone's functionality 
as he seems to, and I therefor think the assumption make his statistics 
irrelevant. I therefor stand by my original "third of the world" statement.
>
> That is the way, open source development works. One has some needs and
> does it himself or finds someone to do it for him. It is not about
> blaming others for not taking his personal needs into account (even if
> there are millions of others having the same needs).
I see this confusion quite often. I run an open source based company[1], 
and I am a board member of an open source promoting non-profit. If I sit 
at home and write an open source project[2], no one has the right to 
complain. Then again, if it is my company that is sponsoring my time for 
the project[3], for example because it is part of a larger product[4], 
then I need to make the distinction between those who just use the free 
part and those who are customers. Still, if I choose the wrong 
technology, people will point it out to me. I think that there is a 
chance that Carsten is making a bad choice here, for some definition of 
bad. His answer did not go any distance toward making me think 
otherwise. In fact, the more I read the more I get the feeling that the 
ONLY thing going for EFL is that Carsten loves it like a mother.

Again, if he was a standalone developer, I would have no leg to stand 
on. In this case, however, it is the money I intend to put into buying 
the machine that pays his rent. This is not the FOSS model. If you read 
his reasoning, statistics and average salaries claim, you will see that 
very plainly.

That is why I mentioned that the phone is free. We are used to such 
logic from proprietary companies.

Shachar
[1] http://www.lingnu.com
[2] http://sf.net/projects/fakerootng
[3] http://sf.net/projects/rsyncrypto
[4] http://www.lingnu.com/backup.html