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LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

Posted Jan 18, 2012 17:27 UTC (Wed) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742)
In reply to: LCA: Addressing the failure of open source by ortalo
Parent article: LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

If you want to focus on end-user applications, KDE is a good place for you :-)

Especially, with mobile devices, apps and so on in mind, Plasma Active ( http://plasma-active.org/ ), is one of the most significant projects we currently have in FLOSS. It's basically using the plasma libraries, known from the KDE desktop, to build the user interface, apps and widgets for mobile devices like tablets etc.

Alex


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LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

Posted Jan 18, 2012 19:07 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Are there shipping devices?

LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

Posted Jan 18, 2012 20:43 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

Yes. The GTA04 can run plasma-active.

See here: http://blog.the-leviathan.ch/?p=308

and is shipping. See here: http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04

(yes, this is still under development so it isn't perfect yet).

LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

Posted Jan 24, 2012 20:36 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

The GTA04 is a motherboard replacement for the Neo Freerunner or the Openmoko Neo 1973. Therefore you need such a device to install the new motherboard.

I hope they get beyond having such a rarefied audience.

LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

Posted Jan 25, 2012 0:41 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

True, but you can still buy the Neo Freerunner, and you'll see at the link I posted that you can order a complete phone (not sure how many they have parts for, but > 0).

Yes, I hope they/we get beyond such a narrow audience, but you have to start somewhere, and making cases is *hard* (though there have been small successes even there e.g. http://www.shapeways.com/shops/slyon)

LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

Posted Jan 25, 2012 0:57 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

Best of luck - we really do need this.

LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

Posted Jan 18, 2012 21:45 UTC (Wed) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654) [Link]

Maybe I misled you. KDE or Plasma Active may have some hack value indeed, however, by citing KMyMoney, I wanted to focus on the "money" part only.
This is a useful personal finance application, for... *personal finance* (to me at least).
Maybe that's where the effort should go now: finance apps, office apps, administrative file management for... (whatever is useful for the general public), geographical apps, education, etc. There are several already, but nothing that can be as bullet proof (and varied) as for C programming, network file transfer, etc.
I am even sure these things could have some hack value if only engineers could figure easily on themselves what is truly useful.

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