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A toy and a promise from Nokia

A toy and a promise from Nokia

Posted May 26, 2005 11:25 UTC (Thu) by johnny (subscriber, #10110)
Parent article: A toy and a promise from Nokia


I was hoping that handheld Linux machines would standardize on Qtopia.

Too few people can use the existing Qtopia applications (since they in
practice require a Zaurus device), and too few apps are being created.

This chicken-and-egg problem isn't exactly helped by further
fragmentation. Just like on the desktop, open source programmers and
commercial companies alike will now have to choose an environment to
target, provided that they're interested in the small Linux market to
begin with.

Then again, I suppose it was to be expected, and Nokia has every right to
choose themselves what they put in their device. Hopefully Qt will be
ported to PocketPC so that the apps I'm working on can find a bigger
audience...


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Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 26, 2005 13:34 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link]

I could not disagree with you more. If anything, diversity on the desktop has been a good thing, promoting healthy competition between not only GNOME and KDE but also XFce, with each having its strength. And both the X standard and freedesktop.org have been ensuring that all apps can run in either environment, and even appear in each other's menus.

After all, if only Qt/KDE lovers would get a clue and realize that no vendor wants to create ISV confusion by distributing GPL libraries and that C++ sucks as an infrastructure library language (another layer of runtime bloat, so complex that even some small files with templates require hundreds of megabytes of RAM to compile, the ABI changes every year), maybe we'd all be standardized around GNOME. :-)

Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 26, 2005 15:10 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

After all, if only Qt/KDE lovers would get a clue and realize that no vendor wants to create ISV confusion by distributing GPL libraries

Neither Sharp nor the various add on software vendors seemed to have a problem with using Qtopia on the aforementioned Zauruses, and Opera (which ships on the Nokia) uses Qt.
Maybe GTK/Gnome lovers should get a clue and realise that commercial companies don't have a problem buying commercial licences when they want to produce closed source software :-)

Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 26, 2005 16:57 UTC (Thu) by tao (guest, #17563) [Link]

Nokia doesn't use the Opera UI, only the rendering engine from Nokia. No QT involved.

Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 26, 2005 19:04 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Neither Sharp nor the various add on software vendors seemed to have a problem with using Qtopia on the aforementioned Zauruses

Sharp ? No. Add on software vendors ? No. Users ? Yes. When I've checked and found that I can not use most of my C860-compatible software with new C3000... This not what I want - and it's really hard to keep binary compatiblity between different releases of QT-basec things. GNOME is not perfect either but at least they are trying - unlike QT/KDE. And changes in C++ ABI is biggest problem there...

Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 26, 2005 19:11 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

Admittedly the Qt documentation etc. is excellent, but have you looked at
the Qt commercial version prices?
http://www.trolltech.com/products/embedded/pricing.html
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/pricing.html

"All developers in your company using Qt will need individual licenses."

For a small company, especially the embedded version prices are pretty
steep. The developed software has to sell pretty well to get back both
the cost of development effort + development SW for the developers and how
many of the companies producing just PDA software are doing economically
that well?

Anyway, I don't think it will take that long from someone to port Qt to
the device. It seems pretty standard Linux with X11 and all...

Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 28, 2005 5:50 UTC (Sat) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link]

The licensing prices aren't all that unreasonable for a business, relative to the probable salary of the developer. So I wouldn't expect the license cost to affect businesses much. Non-businesses that don't want to use the GPL may have troubles with the price. For instance research labs at some universities may want to distribute software, but not be allowed to use the GPL for one reason or another (perhaps the funding agencies require something else, like a BSD license).

I am personally happy that Trolltech has a GPL release for such a great software library. And I don't worry about the C++ API for two reasons. First, I've met a lot of GUI developers that like C++. Second, I use the python bindings.

A toy and a promise from Nokia

Posted May 26, 2005 21:21 UTC (Thu) by johnny (subscriber, #10110) [Link]

It wasn't my intention to start yet another qt vs gtk war, I just feel
that embedded Linux needs to be a reliable application platform just like
the competitors from Palm and MS. It's obvious that "shared library hell"
and application intercommunication hell will continue on the handhelds,
just like on the desktop.

Ok, I'll do as suggested and stop whining. Sorry about that.

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