I have bashed Trolltech publically and privately a lot but I can do the opposite as well. Last November I have celebrated a birthday for Trolltech for going proprietary. But some things have changed. They have released Qtopia as GPL but in contrast to previous releases they publish maintenance releases in time as GPL as well. So this is really awesome and I hope this continues with the next major release.

It is true that certain features such as SXE, Phone library and probably more is missing. But for SXE there is the BitFrost replacment of OLPC, for the Phone library one could implement it using the Moko libgsm. So technically there is no obstacle in porting Qtopia to your device and fix the bugs on the way. Politically I would like to see Trolltech to get more involved with the community.

Trolltech is facing several challenges. No community project is actively working on getting Qtopia on a real device with the aim to make it usable. It is one thing to see the home screen but it is a totally different story to create a usable, working product. So the two challenges are to find some one integrating Qtopia in the public and bringing it to product quality. The other is Trolltech being capable to listen to feedback and to incorporating patches.

The other related challenge is exposure to the community. You can go to a shop and buy a GNOME Mobile and Embedded device. You are able to write your own applications, you are able to synchronize it with your desktop. Sadly there is no Qtopia product you can buy in shops, none you can reprogram or write third party applications for. (Same applies to Windows Mobile and Symbian as well)

Integrating into the community. There is a lot of focus on Mobile and Embedded systems within GNOME. Technology such as Evolution Data Server, Telepathy, Tinymail, GStreamer looks well done, can run on consumer electronic and provides value to a system integrator, developers and end-users. Trolltech, while Qt can integrate into the glib mainloop, is not integrating with such efforts but is creating non interoperable island solutions.

E.g. if you compare Evolution-Data-Server for PIM with Qtopias solution. AFAIK it is using vCard/vCal/iCal compatible model. This is a pretty good idea as it easily allows synchronisation with Evolution, Kontact, Outlook and iCal on OSX. Qtopia is using an incompatible subset. If Qtopia would have interfaces for synchronizing (it lacks them) it would not be easy to synchronize using iSync, OpenSync, etc. Is there any reason not to use a iCal compatible model? I don’t think so.

Max brought this issue up on qtopia-interest and the answers were not satisfying. It looks like there are difficulties to abstract the Model of an Event, Contact and its visual Representation.

But there are more issues with the developers. I have the impression some of the publically speaking engineers don’t understand the domain of embedded/mobile, low powered devices. Before powertop was released I spent some time stracing Qtopia. In contrast to Qtopia2 there are a lot less timers running, actually the only timer running is responsible for polling /etc/mtab for changes. What is wrong with polling on a 2.6.21 linux system? The list is long but let me highlight inotify and hotplug/hal.
The lame excuse to not use modern features is that Trolltech still targets linux1.3 and gcc1.4 devices. Qt is famous for abstracting API that work on any platform. So they are not able to use inotify on a inotify capable and poll on linux2.4? Ironically Qt is able to do so. It provides a QFileSystemWatcher to do this. It works on Windows, OSX, BSD, Linux. It can use operating system assisted technologies like inotify or fallback to polling. So why doesn’t Qtopia use this functionality? There lame answer is because they can poll better in Qtopia.

To summarize this larger post let me hightlight the points

• The Qtopia Team gets little feedback from paying customers as they have interest in selling patches back to Trolltech
• No OpenSource project is doing the hard work on integrating Qtopia to a device. So Trolltech is not receiving feedback from us.
• The Qtopia Team is not looking at current technology and falls behind.
• The Qtopia Team isn’t winning OpenSource developers to port their applications to Qtopia, or to make them integrate Qtopia based devices with their applications (as Trolltech has no interface for that).

I don’t know if this is due your ROADMAP, the size of the team, the time you have available but finding this is left to the reader…

I think the key is a device in the hand of every user and developer. The Neo1973 promises to be this device. Provide Qtopia for that device? Create a project on labs.trolltech.com, integrate on linux2.6 and provide full GPLed root filesystems. E.g. by releasing your phone library or using Moko’s libgsm.