Why enlightenment?

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:11:37 +0200 Bram Neijt <bneijt at gmail.com> said:

as such the choice of enviornment, thanks to it running x, is not limited, you
can use qt, gtk, sdl, fltk etc. e is a window manager - it happens to also have
spawned toolkits that lend themesleves to unique custom ui's and much more
flexibility than the larger toolkits. trust me on this - gtk's theme system
comes courtesy of me - i wrote it years ago. i know how far you will be able to
push gtk (without breaking it and effectively creating a new incompatible
toolkit). qt until a few months ago has a major license issue - GPL for a
library forces ALL apps to effectively be GPL. for the entire development of
gta02 it was GPL. GPL inherently restricts the freedom of app developers to NOT
make software GPL (MIT, BSD< or any other license they choose). if you chose to
ship with a GPL toolkit - then you limit what app developers can do. so qt was
right out (and i know a whole bunch of developers who simply dont want todo c++
in order to use qt - they want to use c or something else).

so gtk has its limits - also i have heard enough complaints of it being slow -
and that is from commercial developers in big electronics houses. they really
are not squeakingly happy with gtk and are hunting for other solutions. qt had
the license problems until a few months ago.

so what other choices do you have if you have eliminated qt for license
reasons and you think gtk is just not up to snuff and is unlikely to get there
easily without major breaks?

> True, I expected to like the Freerunner as a phone and thought the whole
> freedom would just be an added bonus. If the phone isn't that good, I
> could always fix small bugs and help out.
> 
> However, it turns out that I can't understand the direction the
> mainstream development is going, and with this small community, the bugs
> in other distributions are not small at all.
> 
> So I seem have to make a choice: put in allot of time, or stick with a
> product that I can't understand. The last option is just to sell the
> thing before the value drops to much and buy something else.
> 
> As you say, choices had to be made and this is it. I don't think I'm
> closer to understanding the reasoning behind choosing for e, but maybe
> this is just an opinion, and we should leave it at that. In the meantime
> I think I'll just have to reset my expectations, and decide what I want
> to do with this phone.
> 
> Thank you for your reply.
> 
> Bram
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, 2009-04-16 at 15:02 +0200, arne anka wrote:
> > > So what if the company decided to use that money for something you do
> > > not want to be part of, or you think they are throwing away your money
> > > doing stupid things. Well, I think at that moment you should pawn the
> > > product, not endorse it (maybe even publicly denounce it) and then find
> > > another company or product you can be happy with.
> > 
> > that's a constellation you have to cope with in every commercial product  
> > (and even in others, too, though you might not measure your investments in  
> > terms of money).
> > what's more, with most companies you don't neither have a saying in what  
> > the money is spent for nor do you actually get information about what that  
> > company plans are at all.
> > 
> > the difference with the freerunner is, that you can install what  
> > environment you want and that you are not limited by the decisions the  
> > company makes after you bought.
> > with the amount of freedom available, openmoko as company in question  
> > cannot be supposed to invest in all and every available technology, be it  
> > a desktop environment or merely a toolkit, but instead one way has to be  
> > chosen.
> > but om having their money on e does not mean, you are forced to use e.
> > 
> > if, on the other hand, you demand that you have a saying in what the  
> > company does with your money, clinging to the merely ficitional conception  
> > of splitting your money in a part for the actual hardware, a part for  
> > development done and a part for development to come -- there won't be many  
> > things left you could purchase.
> > 
> > btw: that whole question is not at all about e or gtk or qt, but what to  
> > expect from a frre device -- and that question in turn has been discussed  
> > in extenso already.
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Openmoko community mailing list
> > community at lists.openmoko.org
> > http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Openmoko community mailing list
> community at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
> 


-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    raster at rasterman.com