[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Re: Re: Scratchbox is not an emulator

[From: Ross Burton]

On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 19:55 +0200, Christian Pernegger wrote:
> > Some of the applications on the 770 are not open for various reasons
> 
> There were a few examples of stuff that might understandably be closed
> in my last post, feel free to add Opera to that, even Flash if you
> like (as old as the supplied version is, one of the FOSS re-writes
> might give it a run for its money, though ^^)

I seriously doubt that a Free Flash will match the official Flash for
some time, but that is another story.  The blog for the Linux port of
Flash is very interesting: http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/.  One of
the recent posts talks about the Flash rendering model and how it's
impossible (well, near impossible) to use Cairo to implement the Flash
rendering model: it has to be implemented from scratch, including all of
the weird bugs from old versions that are relied upon in large amounts
of content.

The same argument is that Wine will give Windows a run for it's money.
The devil is in the details.

> >From reading this list and the fact that the chroot environment is
> quite bare I got the impression that even stuff Nokia did not license
> from other companies but develop themselves was closed as well -- that
> might well be wrong, so I'll go look through the svn before I say
> anything else :)

I can say for sure that the addressbook application in IT2006 is closed
source, although the backend is open source (it's Evolution Data Server,
LGPL).  For the rest of the user-level applications its a mixed bag as
far as I know: some are open source as they are derived from existing
open source software, and some are closed.

Ross
-- 
Ross Burton                                 mail: ross at burtonini.com
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