Hey Lorn,
I’m not going to abuse blogs as mailinglist or forum but I have some random thoughts. So Lorn Microsoft is a Free Software supporter because they hired the Gentoo Founder? I always thought that Microsoft doesn’t like Free Software too much, after applying your logic I recognize my failure. I like old cars as well, I used to drive an old VW beatle during summer and winter. Yes it was old, easy to repair and I think I understood most parts of the car. Oh and it has had serve security issues as well. But in contrast to cars, software isn’t likely to stay the same for more than fourty years and as our products are virtual I prefer to fix security issues. I prefer to fix issues that annoy users, I prefer to fix issues where a user can lose personal data. So in contrast to my old VW Volkswagen Qtopia 2.2 is not usable for many reasons. I get spare parts for the beatle, I do not get support for Qtopia 2.2, fabricating issues of the beatle are well documented, they are not documented at all for Qtopia, there is a local community of beatle drivers helpimg me out in need… I think if I would have a commercial Qtopia2.2 license and file bug reports your support will likely to tell me that these things are fixed in Qtopia4 and ask me to upgrade. So even your support will ask me to not use the unmaintained Qtopia2.2.
And there is no word in my previous post that blames Qtopia for something. Opie’s error was the lack of differentiation to Qtopia. People thought both were Free Software and failed to see the difference. The difference was that Opie secured the Freedom of the Platform and created this community were issues were documented and fixed. This included public mailinglists, bugtracker and source control management.

And to the compability. I seriously wonder if you are a core developer, and you found issues why didn’t you file bug reports? Or as you are a core developer why didn’t you write a fix and shared it with us? This was what Max and Me did when making Opie-Console work for the Sharp.ROM. Do you know about weak symbols? These things make it possible to compile apps against Opie’s libraries and let them work on Sharp.ROM and Qtopia1.7. So really if you don’t have a clue about how our and Qtopia’s library work internally don’t make false statements.

Oh and yes, shared libraries are fluff. Instead of sharing an implementation between 15+ apps it would be better to write 15 different implementations with different bugs and different issues. And if you don’t see the value of a sane and flexible debugging framework talk to the creators of Qt and ask them why they did something similiar in Qt4. Have you ever debugged on a device? And yes getting debug messages across a network is a feature I have regulary used when debugging on devices. This can be used when running test cases, it can be used when you don’t have much space on rootfs and don’t want to use NFS for keeping logs. But such features are only obvious if you actually test stuff on devices.

love and peace
zecke

PS: luckily I didn’t respond