four quickies.
1. the people over at coverity who have been offering free-as-in-beer defect reporting of open source apps has got kde merged into their build system. it's not listed on the page yet, but will be there in the coming days. this is great news =)
i've seen a prelim report, but the official results aren't there yet. please don't inundate them with requests for access to the reports at this time, though please feel free to send them a "thanks!" email to let them know how much we appreciate their efforts. if you do need/want an account to see the reports, please coordinate this through ade and dirk once they have access (which will probably be a few days i imagine).
2. i complete agree sebr about articles that are more half-assed opinion pieces than professional overviews. i can read slashdot for the former, don't we have a big enough community to get more of the latter published?
besides, half-assed opinion pieces are my domain. ;) and on that note...
3. ebn. yep, i said some "mean" things alright ade. but i know you can take it. ;) it is cool to see ebn improving, though, so lazy people like me have a better time mining through the fruits of your labour ... hope you enjoy your thesis writing sequester ...
4. in the "grey is the new black" theme ... the 770 is the new zaurus.
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Haha been thinking about the 7700 a little bit recently and how it parallels with the Zaurus. Will it suck away resources from Gnome? Or will they work together as devs try to slim down gnome to fit on the $100 laptop? I predict that it will just be a big waste of time for a lot of devs who end up with a piece of hardware they don't use and is obsolete in two years. If Gnome can get anything out of it, we will see.
Well,
look at O-Hand.com, imendio, movial. All these are companies somehow sponsored by Nokia which employee about ~20 GNOME hackers. So this N770 will have a big impact in the future.
Also recognize it already had a big impact. Nokia planned Maemo/N770 for many years and many bugfixes and improvements in GNOME and Gtk+ were paid by Nokia...
To 4.)
In the same theme:
-the new Qtopia is Gtk/Maemo?
-the new Qt/E is Gtk?
do you agree with that?
> the new Qtopia is Gtk/Maemo?
if you compare the two on a technical level, no.
the comparison i made was not one of technical capabilities (where the difference is rather large; i wouldn't bother comparing QtE and Gtk+ in any serious fashion), but of what i expect to happen market- and expectation-wise.
when i first heard about the 770 i immediately thought about the zaurus experience several years ago. after watching it unfold is fairly expected ways, i think the parallels are many
the zaurus ultimately was a -very- cool bit of hardware and software that provided a really nice and complete linux based portable system offering everything from note taking to browsing to office document reading to games. it led to development work on a number of kde/qt apps (embedded korg leaps to mind, for instance), but ultimately failed in the market and despite everyone's excitement really failed to leave a lasting impression.
> the comparison i made was not one of technical capabilities
neither did I. I agree that the situation looks very similiar. Sharp SL-5000d gets released and we see a lot of ports and small utilities. Now with the N770 the same is happening, So where is the difference? Sharp/Trolltech was mainly interested in the community for marketing interests. Nokia created and published a completely free (LGPL) platform. So what we see is the maintainers of the applications and companies like imedio, o-hand.com, fluendoand movial are doing the ports instead of random joe.
The direct consequence is: Instead of dead-end ports we have long term improvements. Look at maemo, it is GNOME for Consumer Electronics. Nokia showed how to make use of GNOME Technology, and now we see Palm and Palm Source following in developing their platform utilising Gtk+
What I personally see is the momemtum QtE/Qtopia had is shifting torwards Gtk+/GNOME.
> published a completely free
> (LGPL) platform
is this a statement of your lack of credibility or is it intended to be flamebait? ;) seriously, the "completely free" arguments got tired back in the bsd vs linux days.
> Instead of dead-end ports we have
> long term improvements.
if you look at Qt4, so many of the improvements there to do with performance and footprint came out of the embedded efforts.
similar positive effects came for khtml and other bits that ended up on "embedded" systems
it's a lot less different than you seem to think.
> Look at maemo, it is GNOME for
> Consumer Electronics. Nokia
> showed how to make use of GNOME
> Technology, and
yes, in this way the 770 and the Zaurus (well, QtE) are really similar
> now we see Palm and Palm Source
and how many more use QtE? personally i wouldn't trot out Palm as an example of enlightened thinking these days.
> what I personally see is the
> momemtum QtE/Qtopia had is
> shifting torwards Gtk+/GNOME.
which isn't supported by market data in the least. what i do see is that Gtk+ now has the ability to actually properly compete in the space, and we'll see just how well it and its devices do. i expect to see both flourish, actually, and along similar lines to how Qt and Gtk+ do on desktop platforms today.
this is certainly a good thing for Gtk+ as it represents improvement; Qt has little to be concerned over, however.
i'm also happy to see that khtml gets more support here with nokia's efforts on various embedded platforms.
in any case, where i see the real parallel between the 770 and the zaurus is this: they are both cool, but once the enthusiast / early adopter market is saturated it turns out there's not a lot of interest in these kinds of devices. and yet the enthusiast crowd (which is most of us in the OSS "community", btw) gets all excited about it.
it's a little pathetic to watch people get excited about commercial dead end after dead end after dead end when those dead ends are pretty obvious right from the start. too many people get confused between "cool ideas" and "commercially viable" when it comes to -commercial- products. the IT industry history is littered with them.
that's actually what i was obliquely getting at in the blog entry rather than some software and project comparison.
Don't know where to put it else: your plasma wiki is filling up with spam pretty quickly - I would like to help as a second admin or something (I already have some experience as a wiki admin and I am a regular contributor to the wikipedia), but for that you first have to enable spam black lists or lock down the wiki for logged in users only.
If you need help with cleaning up and keeping an eye on this or other wikis, just drop me a message.
liquidat
Speaking as a Zaurus (5600) owner I agree with you Aaron. It's a really awsome tool for use as a computer on the run, but it's appeal is kind of limited (to geeks mostly).
Mobile phones seem like where a lot of the features of these devices will end up. I was just at LWE in Boston and Trolltech had a booth with a bunch of phones plus some other things on display.
I expect a day, soon, where everything a device like the Z, 770, ipod, whatever can do is all wrapped up in a phone. ;-)
I see the N770 as an interesting 'playground' for Nokia, a device where they can test technology and interact with the community. And if all goes well, maybe they'll decide to use open source in other products as well. The commercial success of the N770 -- I think it's possible. I think there could be a market for a small browser tablet, and the N770 is the only one at the moment.
I don't believe the poster above in that 'everything will be in the mobile'. Rather, I believe that everything with a small screen will be in the mobile: camera, music player, mini video player. A mobile pdf viewer, a web browser and a document editor needs a bigger screen and therefore will not be inside a phone.
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