Re: Opie's future

Am Mittwoch, den 16.11.2005, 09:12 -0500 schrieb Neuman, Ben J., A&M
IRM:
> I am a huge fan of the work you guys have done on Opie and am very sad to
> hear it's future might be in jeopardy. Is this true?

It is - somewhat - true. If you recapitulate the history of Opie you
will notice that there was a time when we had ~20 contributors. Most of
them have jumped ship due to several reasons. The most important ones
are [in my subjective view of order of relevance]:

* Sharp dropping the Zaurus from all but the japanese markets
* Opie still using the (outdated) Qt/Embedded 2.3.x
* OpenZaurus being binary incompatible with Qtopia apps
* Opie and Qtopia diverging in source level APIs
* No attractive Qtopia devices since years (Yes, I know about Olympus
and Archos)
* Unclear Opie roadmap, goals, and identity

These reasons not only affected Opie directly but also third party
authors writing applications based on the Qtopia API.

Nowadays, a major part of the remaining Opie contributors seem to be
more interested in going away from Qt/Embedded since a) X no longer is
bloaty or slow compared to Qt/Embedded and b) a small community like us
no longer can afford ruling out millions of applications just because of
direct framebuffer access. Still we very much love Qt as an application
development framework and want to continue using it.

Personally, I consider Opie being more or less frozen except for
bugfixes and perhaps additional device adaptions. I just can't stand the
limitations of Qt 2.x any longer and I quit believing in the value of
exclusive framebuffer access.
That aside, I'm still very interested in writing open source software
for mobile linux devices and I hope that -- after completing my Ph.D.
next summer -- I can return to writing software for X11-based mobile
devices using Qt/X11 4.x and/or Gtkmm/Hildon.

The future of Linux on mobile devices has just begun and it's exciting
to be a part of it.

-- 
Regards,

Mickey.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Dipl.-Inf. Michael 'Mickey' Lauer <[email protected]>
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