Thread: Does Free Fail?
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Posts: 186 | Thanked: 56 times | Joined on Mar 2008
#52
Originally Posted by qole View Post
sorry for the double post, but I just realized there's a bit of a misunderstanding here. I was rereading the first post and I noticed that silvermountain said that one of the solutions to the problem is to share the code of projects that are deemed important.

But silvermountain, if they aren't sharing the code, then the app isn't free at all! Free isn't failing there, they're failing at free!

Open source requires shared code. That's the very core of open source. That's what open source means.

When I reread your original post as a request to make more projects truly open source, because without shared source we can't take over when a dev leaves, I go from disagreeing with you to agreeing with you 100%. We need to ensure that the good Maemo apps are made open source, to avoid 'dead' apps.
Personally, I think the surrounding infrastructure is what makes this difficult in Maemo land. Hopefully, come Harmattan (or whatever it is...), Maemo will have its entire development pipeline through QtCreator (and done nicely), with easy support for compiling / testing directly on the device with no extra steps.

As for the web end of things, frankly I find Garage.maemo.org really ugly and pointless, save for a few neat features like the news feed. I would be really delighted if Nokia moved to Launchpad, for example, which actually makes itself desirable by connecting different projects, distributions, bug reports and support requests under a single easy interface

Oh, and as for development platform: Nokia should take a tip from Palm. They are fresh on the stage with WebOS, and their platform made me smile. They have a Debian package tested for Ubuntu specifically (it being really popular and all). After installing, a single terminal command (as a regular user) pulls open VirtualBox with a fully functioning WebOS emulator.

Then I looked at Maemo again:
http://maemo.org/development/sdks/maemo_4-1-2_diablo/
That site demonstrates what Nokia is doing here: They are running on some delusion that everyone who wants to do software development is willing to spend a day reading through convoluted documentation to set up an SDK so that they can maybe compile a little command line app for their tablet. They assume that developers don't like easy stuff, that everyone writes in Assembly and anything higher level was developed by evil commies to destroy our minds. Oh, and that developers don't read, so documentation is useless.

Then I looked back at Palm:
http://developer.palm.com/

Okay, which one would YOU build software with?

Last edited by Picklesworth; 2009-08-15 at 18:48.
 

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