Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[thomas.cooksey at bt.com]

>And there are already plans for someone to do the necessary XRender
>coding to support GTA02.

That's fantastic news! Why on earth did Harold say that the fact that an accelerated kdrive was being written couldn't be disclosed? What's the problem in telling the community? Not that it matters really. 

If OpenMoko's going for an XLib based theme engine, why bother with XRender? What else uses it other than Cairo? Surely xvideo would be a more useful extension to focus on?


>Because coding simple gradients is trivial and I've already done it :-)

Great, but soon people will want to do ever more complex vector graphics. Perhaps if/when XRender is accelerated, the switch could be made to cairo?


>All in all, the great thing about OpenMoko and the Neo1973 is that
>you're free to choose whatever path you wish to take. If you want to use
>Qtopia on your Neo1973 then you are more than welcome to do so! There
>are many many different Linux distributions and probably almost as many
>graphical user interface projects. One of the great things about the
>Free Software philosophy is choice and the Neo1973 is one of the first
>phones that gives you that ability to choose every single bit of
>software that you use on it.

Sure, and I'm not disputing the fact that you can run whatever you want is a good thing. I just wanted to clarify why development of OpenMoko was continuing given that there is now a more complete and mature alternetive and I think this has been answered:

1) Redundency is good, if Qtopia fails for some reason, there's an alternative.
2) A greater number existing applications can be ported easily to an X based framework. There is also presedent in the Maemo project of where this has been very useful.

I'd like to add a 3rd: Competition breeds innovation. :-)


Cheers,

Tom