Re: My resignation

Marcin Juszkiewicz <[email protected]> Mon, 4 Jun 2007 09:30:20 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.comp.handhelds.opie.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Dnia niedziela, 3 czerwca 2007, Lorn Potter napisaƂ:
> Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:

> > GTK/X11 is best currently - you can do commercial things, open or
> > closed source way. Next is Qt/X11 but this one need license for
> > commercial stuff.

> The reasons you mention here, are not about free open source software,
> but for commercial interests. Opie is free open source software, and
> will always be free software.

> I want more free software, not more commercial software.

I want free software but do not want to close a way to get closed software 
too. Look at Hancom Word, TextMaker, Opera - 3 popular apps for Qtopia 
1.5/Sharp. All were commercial and popular. Maemo got Opera (and Flash 
plugin for it) - also commercial and closed, but works quite nice on my 
770.

X11 gives me a way to take application from desktop and build it to run on 
my handhelds. I can even adapt its source to let it take less 
space/memory but it will still be same app. It is not possible for 
current OPIE as world of QT2/X11 ended few years ago.

Look at palmtops from Palm Inc - each one includes DocumentsToGo which 
allows to edit/view MS Office documents out of the box. OPIE lacks such 
applications, X11 users can run Gnumeric and Abiword (I do not count 
those users which add gigabyte of swap and run OpenOffice.org). Without 
such apps palmtop is degraded to PIM + few games and few apps usually 
written few years ago.

> You want a bad commercial software example? Maemo. Points to all the
> reasons why not to use/develop LGPL software. Do you use Maemo?
> Probably not, because it isn't free open source software.

I use Maemo - my 770 is my gaming device - Mahjongg is nice on it. From 
time to time I use it as mobile web browser. I use it as example how easy 
switching between misc methods of networking can be (here maybe soon 
NetworkManager will show how to do it in X11 based environments).

And I agree that this is commercial environment and also that this is not 
something which I would like to develop for. But it shows device 
potential and make use of it (but rather on N800 as 770 is really 
sluggish hardware).

> > Personally I do not see any future for Qt2/Embedded or GTK/DirectFB
> > as base for handhelds interface base. Maybe Qt4/Embedded (so called
> > Qtopia Core) will change it as one of OPIE founders shown recently
> > some apps from KDE4 easily adapted to it.
>
> Opie has had kde apps for quite a few years now - kpacman, tinykate,
> etc.

And OPIE/Qtopia 1.x/2.x have 3 incompatible versions of microkde library 
due to that. OPIE got users community and have/had some developers which 
were working on same code. Qtopia had that maybe in begining - then more 
and more apps/ports started to be unmaintained and not reachable. And I 
do not want to count how many of them were hardcoded to QVGA resolution.

-- 
JID: hrw-jabber.org
OpenEmbedded developer/consultant

          Monday is a hard way to spend one-seventh of your life.


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