A lovely respond to Lorn Potter of Trolltech
Dear Lorn,
in your recent blog entry you make a couple of claims I would like to analyse/respond to.
You can hack on applications all you want, because Qtopia is GPL, and will always remain GPL. As an open source developer for more than 5 years now, I just don’t get the LGPL and why advocates of free, open source software keep using that license. Do you want more proprietary closed source or software that will always be free?”
I sincerly agree with your opinion on freedom, it is one of the greatest goods we have and should not sacrifice and let’s take a look at your claim. Imagine I write a killer application using SMS and Phone and I test it on my Greenphone. Now I want other people to use this excellent application. They have a Neo1973, a Dreambox, a couple of other HTC devices. So this is where the Freedom starts. I will just compile Qtopia for the Neo1973 (ARM OABI), Dreambox (MIPS and PPC), HTC Devices (ARM EABI) and let my application run and everybody is happy, right?
Wrong, a fundamental part for SMS and Phone the libqtopiahone library is not GPLed and this is where my Freedom is limited. I can not let my application run on any device not officially supported by Trolltech. This is what I normally refer to as binary crap as I’m not free to read the sourcecode, I’m not free to change the code, I’m not free to compile the code and I’m not free to distribute the code.
So Lorn please do yourself and your employee a favor and stop lying to the community by claiming everything is free as in GPL.
z.
PS: If libqtopiaphone is liberated/GPLed I will write another blog posting stating so and will do the Qt(opia)4 dance…
PPS: Use the Neo1973 emulator to adopt Qtopia, and send a image to your colleagues in munich to test it on real hardware.