[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Too busy to accept help? I'm not complaining

Wed Apr 19 22:23:23 EEST 2006

Hello Shawn,

On Wed, 2006-04-19 at 11:59 -0700, Shawn Gordon wrote:
> I've already got Nils slamming me privately because I dared to 
> mention Qtopia, but let me provide some perspective as a company who 
> was very successful with Qtopia and the Sharp Zaurus and what Sharp 
> and Trolltech did both right and wrong that Nokia could learn from (I 
> don't care if they use Qtopia at this stage, I just honestly think it 
> would have been faster and cheaper than going the route they did, but 
> I am not privy to the information that went in to making that decision).

Why would Qtopia be faster and cheaper? I am not trying to troll here
but both have wide support in the Free Software community. (However in
the embedded space GTK might have an edge. GPE is atm better supported
and has more active developers than Opie for example. And I am not
stating that because I happen to be involved with GPE, but because both
Opie and GPe are involved with familiar we know about each other
projects and we even co-operate on certain parts.)

> Now by the time the Zaurus was commercially available, my company 
> already had a dozen products running on it, maybe more, and there was 
> a big and healthy open source movement that was also producing 
> software, I don't remember how many apps, but it was a good amount 
> and grew very rapidly.

Well Nokia might not have had applictions readily available before the
product was released. But I do remember porting an app in the maemo SDK
before the device was actually available

> What was done right:
> 
> 1.Sharp actually located about 50 companies and individual developers 
> 2.They worked with Handango to create a web site where commercial and 
> 3.Trolltech hired a liaison to work directly with the embedded 
> community and keep the line of communication open.

Ok. That indeed are valid points that could contribute to success with
an "open" project. However *again* I see no reason why Qtopia would have
been an advantage. In it's own right I believe the technical choice GTK
vs QT(opia) has nothing to do with the success of these projects. As you
point out political choices are much more important. Nokia has supported
Gnome and has hired professional companies to support them as can be
seen in Ari Jaaksi's presentation from Boston see (slide 7):
http://www.kotiposti.net/jaaksi/ME9_LinuxWorld_2006_AriJaaksi_.pdf .
So the one thing they really need to do is having somebody that can put
time in co-ordinating the community and pass on all interesting
developments to the people in Nokia who take the decisions. This last
part has not yet been done. And if they manage to pick up the good
things from the community it will become a killer product. So they
definitely need to work on point 3. Apart from that the used toolkit
point is completely moot. The 770 would probabely be as good/bad as it
is now regardless of GTK or QT.

Regards,

Philippe

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