[Gllug] PDAs

[Pete Ryland]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 04:55:36PM +0000, Matthew Allum wrote:
> 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. 

:) That was on purpose.  I know things can be heated between the two camps,
and I only emailed him for my own curiosity, but decided to forward the
response FYI, and not so you could return fire.  Anyway, it's 3:30am there
now so he wouldn't be awake anyway.

> > 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. 

Not sure myself.  I hadn't heard of familiar until a year or two ago, but
that doesn't mean it wasn't around earlier.

> 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... 

Nah, that's just John for you.  By nature he's a coder, not a sysadmin, and
not a packager, so he's just handwaving to say "look, we didn't invent it,
but we could have since it's actually quite simple".  I probably should have
snipped that bit.

> > 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 ).

This I didn't know.

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

Hmm.. interesting.

> > 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. 

Not at all.  Simply, if you want to link proprietary code to it, you must
pay.  If you are doing GPL stuff, you don't.  Not perfect, but it fuels
further development of GPL code, so it's a pretty good compromise.

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

Please see "The X Window's (sic) Trap": http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/x.html

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

In fact it's not.  See: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

If they had given an LGPL option, companies wanting to link their
proprietary code to it would legally be able to do so without paying
royalties.

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

You'll not get flames from me, just wood for the fire. :)

Pete
-- 
Pete Ryland
http://pdr.cx/

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