At the risk of being flamed : State of software

[Marcin Juszkiewicz]

Dnia piątek, 24 sierpnia 2007, wim delvaux napisał:

> 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.

The problem with QTopia is that you will get GPL version (so no commercial 
applications for it) or will force OpenMoko into license payments. To get 
phone functionality of Qtopia OpenMoko company would have to pay for 
commercial Qtopia Phone or wrote whole phone subsystem from scratch as 
there is no phone functionality in Qtopia4/GPL.

And if you go into Qtopia world you will get small amount of applications. 
There was "lot" of stuff for old Qtopia versions (1.5->2.2) but none of 
them can be "just built" for Qtopia4 version (and you do not really want 
to play with Qtopia <4.x - trust me - I spent over two years with OPIE 
hacking). So at start all you get is Qtopia4 stuff which is done for 
devices which have atleast few keys (but probably can be used with 
touchscreen only too). Forget about syncing PIM data to something other 
then Qtopia4 Desktop (if it exists), forget about many X11 based 
applications/games (I know that most of them needs to be adapted to small 
screen but many of them can be just used).

> 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 ? ...

For me LGPL is proper license for such device. It allows to write free 
applications which will use any license (all those hackers which you 
listed) AND it allows to write commercial stuff. We have GPS on device - 
how many Linux applications you know which can show you maps and route 
you from one place to another? I know few:

- TomTom Navigator (commercial)
- Garmin something (commercial)
- Maemo Mapper (can be un-Hildoned, require network connection for routes)

I used TomTom on PocketPC device. If there will be version for Neo1973 
available I will buy it and will use it. I do not want GPS navigation 
application which will use OpenStreetMaps or scanned bitmap maps because 
it lack routing so paper road map is much more handy. If only such apps 
will exists I will buy PocketPC + TomTom and use Neo as BT-GPS.

> So what about porting QTopia to the NEO as backup scenario ?

Feel free to start. After few days of work you will get Qtopia4 working on 
Neo1973. Then you will spend lot of time writing Dialer, SMS application 
and other phone functionality. If you will make it working then someone 
will follow you. But I do not think that there will be many of them.

-- 
JID: hrw-jabber.org
OpenEmbedded developer/consultant

             I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
             		-- Isaac Asimov