At the risk of being flamed : State of software

[Attila Csipa]

On Saturday 25 August 2007 23:10:48 Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:
> commercial Qtopia Phone or wrote whole phone subsystem from scratch as
> there is no phone functionality in Qtopia4/GPL.

Ahem, they DID write the phone subsystem from scratch anyway AFAIK :) I'm a 
bit surprised that nobody mentioned the SINGLE reason NOT to use qtopia. 
Forget all the stories that it's a dirty commercial piece of software from an 
exploitative company in some conspirational way wants to take your freedom 
away... GPL is designed to prevent that and it pretty much does. Really. The 
SOLE reason for not choosing qtopia is that, in order to really and 
officially contribute to the project, you should in effect transfer copyright 
to Trolltech (since qtopia could not be available under the dual licensing 
unless the contributors agreed to it). So you have all your freedoms that you 
have had with GPL, but Trolltech can also make a buck (krone, that is) 
through it's own support and sales channels to manufacturers/programmers. 
That's it. No non-free doubletalk, 'its commercial isnt it', 'no apps for 
it', etc, there is no practical difference form any other run-of-the-mill GPL 
project apart from that. I can understand that for being an issue, especially 
for large companies as FIC (or OpenMoko), and thus the choice is 
understandable, but the talk of Qt(opia) being 'too much work to adapt', 
non-GPL/non-free spirited, hard to use, C++ only, nerdy, whatever, they are 
all excuses. It comes down to this - do you want to deal with Trolltech, 
which BTW has a competitive product, or keep all the strings and start from 
scratch, literally making the whole framework and applications with a 
recognizable brand ? That choice was made in the form of GTK and OpenMoko as 
a platform, but let's not FUD all over the place that it was a technical 
issue of not wanting 'writing the phone subsystem from scratch' - it's like 
saying instead of a replacing a missing door we thought it was easier to 
build a new house...

> 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

No need to go into deep licensing issues, but LGPL is the thing that should be 
avoided, isn't it ? I mean, why go through all the trouble of making a free, 
open phone if you're planning or running proprietary/closed source software 
on it ? In that case, even a Qt-like dual license is better since at least it 
brings some income to the core developers.