Re: My resignation

Just  a few words to add as a life sign (I am still around :)

On Monday 04 June 2007 09:30:20 Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:

> 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.

That is my point for long now. The X11 of course path has many drawbacks- you 
have to cope with GPE as the only complete environment, performance on our 
device is not so optimal, integration of all capabilities (Bluetooth, WLAN, 
etc.) is somehow not so obvious. But it really offers you the tools people 
would like to work with. Take a look at notecase, abiword, et. al.
Some years ago when we started Opie it was a killer application and the ideas 
we had were great, making it more Newton-like than WindowsCE and PocketPC 
from MS were.
Today I don´t see some sort of market any more due to the limitations Opie 
brings- well integrated of course.
For my daily use Opie has been blocking me for a while from doing all sorts of 
work.
I feel that the requirements for a PDA-like device like the Zaurus is more the 
pocket version of a computer. pdaXrom has done a good job here however I dont 
like the sperate way they are going.

From my daily work with WindowsCE I have learned to hate the closed 
environment MS is offering. Each corner you are looking at has different 
restrictions and limitations and there is nothing common with the desktop 
environment. Example ? ActiveSync with Windows Mobile 5 is based on TCP/IP, 
however you can not "hijack" this connection or get an IP address for it to 
ping the desktop. MS prevents you from doing this.

The future of Linux based embedded devices imho is the universal tool which is 
desktop compatible. XFce4.4 could be a good start- one could even bring 
certain KDE apps to run.

With OpieII I do not see that this compatibility is given but leads to another 
restricted environment with the same problems in the long run.

My few cents.

Oliver
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