At the risk of being flamed : State of software

wim delvaux wim.delvaux at adaptiveplanet.com
Fri Aug 24 16:59:40 CEST 2007


HI all,

Champion of open source and user of familiar on Ipaq when time was new, i 
wonder if it was such a good idea to rewrite from scratch an entire GUI 
system.

Knowing that the device is now about 6 months late and looking at the overall 
stability and completeness of the GUI (List of issues is still long perhaps 
too long ?) I wonder if it would not have been a better solution to put 
things like QTopia on the phone. I mean, how long will it still take to get 
things to this level 
(http://trolltech.com/products/qtopia/learnmore/screenshots4/?searchterm=screenshots) ?

Perhaps with a different style or something but at least QTopia has been 
around for quite a few years, sporting a nice portfolio of apps, having a 
nice ,portable and powerfull GUI library.

I know that the software is not fully GPL and FREE but what REALLY is Fully 
free ? AFAIK you can mess around with qtopia ad lib (hey, look at opie's 
fork), sources are available, support is great (KDE ...) and for FIC's sake, 
they can focus there entire resource of a great phone.

For me, the free community does not need (really) a new GUI library.  It needs 
a good phone ! Our interest lies in having a nicely featured device available 
so that we hackers can release our creativity and write apps that users like 
and not - yet again - re-invent the wheel to start all over again.  And for 
what ? For a theme ? For true GPL ? ...

So what about porting QTopia to the NEO as backup scenario ? I.e. how much 
more delays can we afford ?

W




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