OpenMoko as a free platform -was Qtopia for Neo

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 17:07 +0200, AVee wrote:
> 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. 

Heh, I always love it when this argument comes up in a discussion about
GPL vs LGPL/BSD. If that is how you feel then there is no reason someone
developing non-free software should get their kernel, their libc, their
compiler, their build system, their graphics drivers, their gsm stack
and so on either for free is it? 

In fact troll tech should probably pay 146 Euro per SDK to each of the
underlying libraries they depend on for each commercial copy they sell
of Qtopia or Qt according to your logic. I mean why should troll tech
get a free ride if anyone else doesn't?

Personally I have always felt that the important thing is a free
platform and not necessarily that each and every application is 'free'.
The goal of OpenMoko as I see it is to provide a free platform for
anyone to use, whatever licensing they want to use. And the GUI toolkit
is part of that. Which is why they currently use a LGPL licensed toolkit
in the form of GTK+.

Christian