Qtopia coming for Neo1973

Dani Anon mrtitor at gmail.com
Tue Sep 25 17:51:26 CEST 2007


On 9/25/07, AVee <openmoko-comunity at avee.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 September 2007 10:32, Dani Anon wrote:
> > On 9/25/07, Lorn Potter <lpotter at trolltech.com> wrote:
> > > Carlo E. Prelz wrote:
> > > > Quoting Dani Anon (mrtitor at gmail.com):
> > > >> - But QT is not free (as in beer) for commercial usage
> > > >
> > > > This is not the only reason why Qtopia is sub-optimal.
> > >
> > > It's not a reason at all. Neo is a "free" phone! If I wanted commercial
> > > applications, I could easily use any other phone out there. The reason
> > > why we are all here, is because the Neo is 'free software'. Would the
> > > Neo interest you as much if it wasn't as 'free'?
> >
> > Tell that to all the people using Wine under Linux.
>
> I'll use commercial app if they are worth the money. But i really don't see
> how someone developing a non-free (both in speech as in beer) should get
> their toolkit for free. When you expect people to pay for *your* software you
> should not be suprised when you have to pay for a toolkit yourself.
> The SDK appears to cost 146 euro, that should be an affordable investment for
> any commercial developer.

Yep, but there's this undeniable fact that having 0 entry cost invites
a whole new class of developers that you wouldn't have otherwise. I
think we could perfectly choose QTopia and just handicap commercial
developers, either of the options is better than having two options.

> > I thing gp is right, c might be better than c++ for small devices and
> > certainly you need to code in c++ to take advantage of qtopia
> > components.
>
> Why whould plain C be better, what matters in the and is the binary that is
> spit out by the compiler. I don't see why a C++ compiler should produce a
> binary that is somehow less suitable for small devices.
> Theoretically two programs written it two totally different languages could
> still compile to identical binaries providing identical functionality. If
> your C program is indeed more suitable for small devices it just means your
> C++ compiler needs to be improved. You do realize that C++ was explicitly
> designed with embedded software in mind?

I've said a couple of times that I prefer QTopia technically, and I
personally prefer c++, I was just agreeing with GP on the language
choice being a possible concern, because there is a couple of cons to
requiring c++. But I agree with you on this.

> > > > Also, Qtopia, by having no X server running in the background, makes
> > > > it much more difficult for the average developer to bring his/her own
> > > > window to the screen of the phone.
> > >
> > >   not really. <qt-rant>In fact, coding with Qt is much faster than gtk.
> > > Ask people that have done both.</qt-rant>
> >
> > agree, anybody that has tried both knows it's like night and day, qt
> > is miles ahead in ease of development.
>
> And if I where developing a pure basic phone, I'd drop the X server right
> away. But for a device like the Neo 1973 i'm not that sure. There are quit
> some existing applications I'd like to run on that thing and most of them are
> X applications. Losing X is good thing,not being able to use all that code
> out there is not. I'm not totaly convinced of either approach yet, I guess
> both have their place.

Also agree with you there, there are pros and cons to having an X
server I was just answering to the people pretending that there are no
cons at all, which is untrue.

Dani

> AVee
>
> --
> When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look
> like a nail.
>
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