Trolltech announced the GREENPHONE some where last month. It is intended to be a developer device but the design and hardware features are modeled after the average low cost consumer phone. While we have seen on linuxdevices.com articles stating Qt2 is not capable of running on such phones and requiring a higher Bill of Material (BOM), e.g. needing a faster CPU, more flash and more RAM to run. So with the GREENPHONE Trolltech probably tries to demonstrate that it can run on such phones and that it runs well. I think this is a great idea and I hope this works out.

But sadly there are issues with this approach. This phone seems to be locked back down in the past. It runs an ancient and unmaintained major version of the kernel. It is likely to use a gcc that didn’t know that the used processor exists and created slow code for this platform, it is likely to use a zlib, png and jpeg library that has known security issues. I have seen this pattern in the past and I think I know the answer. The award winning Qtopia environment relies on the award winning set of tools from MontaVista. I think this is the corporate ride the dead horse game normally called Return of Investment.

Now to the solution. Trolltech tries to attract OpenSource developers. While I do Free Software I still think they want to attract me. So if they license Qtopia Core and Qtopia Phone under a Free Software compatible license we could create an alternative image that is both smaller and faster than the default installation and make Trolltech use that community but fully API compatible image. It would be a great win for 3rd party developers, it would be great for Trolltech it would be great just for everyone.

So Trolltech please use a suitable license allowing the magic to happen or take the shortcut and hire me and let me work on switching your image over to EABI, switching Qtopia over to uclibc, hacking gcc to produce less code and making the linux footprint smaller. It is up to you.