[Gpephone-devel] Gpephone-devel Digest, Vol 12, Issue 1
Nils Faerber
nils.faerber at kernelconcepts.de
Mon Mar 3 10:42:58 CET 2008
dongbiao fang schrieb:
> I have not received Email from gpephone ,
> now phone project base on Linux has
> 1 . Google,has Android platform
And Android is only little about Linux. It is 90% Java APIs.
> 2 . Nokia , has co-operatedwith Trolltech,has Maemo platform
In fact Nokia bought Trolltech ;) So Trolltech's future especially
concerning QTopia Phone Edition and the competition to Symbian is quite
unknown. For the short-term Nokia announced that licensing and products
will stay the same - let's see.
Concerning Maemo this is a complete independant development, not rising
from the phone devision of Nokia but from the multi-media devision -
this devision has also built TV sets and settop boxes. With Maemo they
have built a system from ground up, including specialised kernel to suit
their needs in powermanagent and built a very nice application framework
- and all with open source methodology and fair play with the open
source community, well done!
> now ,how about gpephone, what is its vendor? limo? others?
GPE Phone Edition is completely independant. It is an open source
project and as such has no specific "vendor" - but there are for sure
commercial entities providing professional support for it, like
ourselves, i.e. kernel concepts.
GPE Phone Edition is built upon the LiPS standards - the "competing"
organisation compared to LiMO. The advantage of LiPS is that all its
results are open and free to use, i.e. everyone is entitled to use the
LiPS standards and build their own implementation of them. G(PE)^2 is
one of them.
This gives the freedem for the developers to decide using which
technolgy they want to implement the standard.
In contrast LiMO, as far as it is known by now, will provide a complete
software stack (i.e. implementation). This looks appealing at a first
glance but on the other hand limits your freedom of choice in software
components and implementations.
> Newton once said: let's stand on the Titan's shoulder
Currently it is hard to say who will become that Titan.
There are players with big money involved, like Google and LiMO. But
personally I do not trust money when it comes to technology.
Then there are "smaller" consortiums like LiPS doing good technical work
but are now pressured from the two big ones waving their dollar bills.
And then there are the really small ones, like OpenMoko or GPE Phone
Edition, having good technology, coming from the roots of open source
but almost without money.
The Linux kernel and system was developed without big money involved and
look how far it got. Let's see if we can get as far in the mobile industry.
> why Andriod and Maemo can't stand on the Gpephone?
Because they are completely different approaches.
Android is pure Java. It just uses the X-server for GUI and that's it.
Maemo and GPE Phone Edition are in fact quite similar as we both use
components from the Gnome-Mobile stack - i.e. GTK+, DBus, a lot of
standards from freedesktop.org etc.
> if they are all open source software.
Mostly ;)
You can expect that neither Android (at least the base system of
Android) nor LiMO stuff will really be open source or developed with an
open source methodology. Having the source available does not make open
source. It largely depends on what you are allowed to do with the source
and especially how modifications from the community can get back into
the main source tree.
Trolltech suffered from this for a very long time. Since they are doing
dual licensing you can have the GPL'ed source code, modify it,
redistribute the modified version and thus creating a fork of it, but it
is *almost* impossible to merge public changes back into their main
version - for dual licensing they have to keep 100% copyright of their
source so third parties have to do a copyright reassignemt which is way
too high burden for open source develpers to get involved (and in fact I
would not like to make my spare time open source work a present for a
company making money from it).
So, where does it lead?
Some call it fragmentation, others competition. We have to see who will
win. One definite winner is Linux since all those activities draw a lot
of attention to Linux which is good.
I, as a long time open source enthusiast, whish that an open source
solution will make the race, i.e. a solution where I can easily
contribute to the system itself and not only by writing applications for
it - this is basically what all the major players want today,
applications for their platforms. I want to be able to change the system
itself. To validate security of every single bit. To be able to make
sure that there are no trap-doors, back-doors or anything else that
could compromise my mobile data. I do not want to do that myself
necessarily. But having the opportunity or just the knowledge that I
could at any time do so would give me a good feeling about it. Today I
do not have that feeling - I know that network providers require
built-in backdoors to mobiles that run on their networks - be it just
proactive SAT applications *shudder*.
Sorry if I cannot provide you with a definitive solution. I fear you
will have to make your own choice ;) If you have further question please
go ahead, either here on the list or by personal mail to me, you are
welcome to.
Cheers
nils
> 2008/2/2, gpephone-devel-request at linuxtogo.org
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> Today's Topics:
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> 1. GPEPhone project broken on Linuxtogo.org <http://Linuxtogo.org>
> (Nicolas)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2008 12:24:53 +0100
> From: Nicolas <nicolasfr at gmail.com <mailto:nicolasfr at gmail.com>>
> Subject: [Gpephone-devel] GPEPhone project broken on Linuxtogo.org
> <http://Linuxtogo.org>
> To: gpephone-devel at linuxtogo.org <mailto:gpephone-devel at linuxtogo.org>
> Message-ID:
> <b9481e140802010324j314d1aeemf6fd96fbf0d3f894 at mail.gmail.com
> <mailto:b9481e140802010324j314d1aeemf6fd96fbf0d3f894 at mail.gmail.com>>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Hi,
>
> FYI the GPEPhone project page is broken on linuxtogo.org
> <http://linuxtogo.org> (downloads and web
> svn access).
>
> Any chance to fix it soon?
>
> Regards,
> Nicolas.
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