[Gllug] PDAs

[Matthew Allum]

on Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 01:07:49PM +0000, Pete Ryland wrote:
> 
> I always thought Qtopia was around before familiar, so I asked a developer
> at Trolltech:
>

Good for you. It would have been nice if you'd let me know his email
address so I could respond. 
 
> 
> Not sure about the exact timing of specifically familiar, but we did develop 
> with ipaqs running linux which we got from handhelds.org (ie the work done at 
> digital -> compaq's labs). We usually never bothered installing X on the 
> ipaqs.
>

Well Im pretty sure there was nothing made public about qtopia aka qpe
until handhelds.org/familiar had been going for quite a while. 
 
> What they might also be refering to is the ipkg packaging system. An ipkg is 
> just a tar.gz file which has had the extension renamed to .ipk !
> It contains data files and control files much like .deb files from what I 
> understand is where the idea was borrowed from. We use ipkg because it is 
> simple and small to install on a device and is what handhelds.org were using 
> for linux on ipaqs which is one of the first devices we started developing 
> Qtopia on, (although we also had QPE on Cassiopieas before that and some 
> other test board). BTW ipkg is basically just a shell script which extracts 
> the .ipk package file, extracts the data to the root directory and then 
> extracts the control data files to somewhere else. There's a bit more to it 
> than that.
>

Ipkg is a lot more than this. True its a packaging format very similar
to debs. But its not a shell script, its C and it does a hell of a lot
more than just untar to the root directory - manage deps etc.

Maybe qt are using a very old version... 
 
> As far as Opie being more free than Qtopia, I can't see how that is so. Opie 
> is a derived work from Qtopia, they essentially copied Qtopia and hacked on 
> it basically changing anywhere that says Qtopia to say Opie, any Qs to Os 
> etc. 
> 

I meant 'more free' ( note quotes ) in the terms of its got a more
thriving developer community etc and the fact there are probably more
GPL'd apps ( compare opie-player2 to the kompanys tkcplayer for example
). Sorry if I mislead anyone.

Also Linux on the sharp does use at least one closed kernel driver 
( The SD slot driver ).

See http://openzaurus.sourceforge.net/oz_website/content/whyoz for
more info on why people dont stick with whats already on the Zaurus. 

> Also don't know about X being more free. Qt/Embedded and Qtopia on top of 
> Linux can be licensed as GPL through out. Most X implementations that I am 
> aware of aren't GPL, usually some special X license thing which technically 
> may or may not be GPL compatible due to advertising clauses or other
> crap. 

XFree is released under a  MIT License;
See http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

> Because you can license Qtopia as GPL, Qt/Embedded as GPL, 
then I don't thnik it gets better than that.
> 

This http://www.trolltech.com/products/qtopia/licensing.html?cid=6
would seem to say the licensing is more complicated than that. 

Please compare with the above MIT license and make up your own mind on
which is more 'free'. 

Also Are the core qte libs LGPL ? Thats normally considered better for
library's .

  -- Matthew 

    ( just responding not wanting to start a flame war or nothing. :-) )

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