oFono, a FSO Clone from Intel and Nokia

Thomas Gstädtner thomas at gstaedtner.net
Sun May 17 00:44:13 CEST 2009


On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 22:45, Lorn Potter <lpotter at trolltech.com> wrote:
>
> On 17/05/2009, at 4:39 AM, Leonti Bielski wrote:
>
>> Yeap, and this is a shame.
>> FSO is great as it is - with more love (especially rewriting
>> essential parts into Vala) it could be the base for all Open Source
>> telephony.
>> I just don't get it.
>> But at least FSO is independent! :)
>
> It's about control. Do you think Nokia and Intel will allow someone
> else to control their telephony stack development?
> It's also about regulatory commissions, certifications and being able
> to get operators to buy into the software. Besides, how do you know
> FSO was the first being developed?
>
> What I don't get is why people think it's bad to have more than one
> open source 'solution'. If reinventing the wheel was bad, we
> wouldn't have KDE, gnome, gtk, and even python, FSO and Linux, for
> that matter. Reinventing the wheel, is _good_.

Generally I would agree, but this is different.
While diversity (for the user) is a good thing, even Gnome and KDE
have realized, that there are situations where you want to have a
single standard. So while there is diversity in the UI software, all
of them use the standards and implementations from freedesktop.org.
Like the name freesmartphone.org implies was the goal to do the same
not for desktop-backends but for smartphone-backends. And nobody wants
diversity there. If a new implementation comes it is there to replace
the other, there's no place for coexistence.
Which one stays is decided by 2 factors: 1) the better one, 2) the one
with more political power.

Just for completeness: FSO hasn't been there first, it started as
reimplementation of the (still active) pyneo.org stack.
So including the qtopia stuff there are currently 4 (3
independent/dbus-based) competitors around.



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