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Karel Jansens's Avatar
Posts: 3,220 | Thanked: 326 times | Joined on Oct 2005 @ "Almost there!" (Monte Christo, Count of)
#21
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
I'll quibble with that. To some, just being part of a highly-demanded, successful project is incentive enough. Consider the Linux developer community at large-- a lot of coding going on with no financial reward!

Heck, if I had the time, I'd rewire my brain from vb.net mode to a maemo-supported development platform and code all sorts of things for pure pleasure.

So to me the question is why isn't maemo enjoying the same level of developer activity that other Linux efforts do? I tend to think the tablets just haven't reached critical mass yet. But thank God for people like Arnim, fanoush and all the other guys whose names escape me at the moment. They are anything but dumb.
Michaelandjones is entitled to choose his own incentive, and criticizing him for choosing an incentive different from yours (spoken in a general sense) is both pointless and -- to stay on topic for the thread -- dumb.

Whether the tablet reaches critical mass (whatever that may be) or not, doesn't change the fact that there are differences between free and commercial software, from the user's point of view. The simple fact that there still isn't a decent wordprocessor for the tablet, despite numerous requests and even demands, should light a little bulb.
 
Karel Jansens's Avatar
Posts: 3,220 | Thanked: 326 times | Joined on Oct 2005 @ "Almost there!" (Monte Christo, Count of)
#22
Originally Posted by Modulok View Post
The reason I will not develop software for the ITs is that I cannot develop for a Linux distro like Maemo. The rise and fall of this distro is controlled by closed software and hardware. Why should I use my free time for developing software which will run as long as Nokia wants to. Its just a matter of my philosophic viewpoint .

Scratchbox is installed and I also have compiled some software but since I know that maemo is a trimmed distro my motivation has reached level 0.
That is actually an interesting and -- IMHO -- quite valid point against developing for the IT. Nokia has broken backwards compatibility once completely already, and once partially, not to mention breaking hardware compatibility as well. In all those occasions Nokia simply expected developers to do most of their work again -- period.

If nothing else, this shows that indeed the community is not in control of Nokia's tablets and, if I were an OSS developer, this alone might make me run for the OpenMoko hills.
 
Posts: 171 | Thanked: 7 times | Joined on Mar 2007
#23
Originally Posted by Karel Jansens View Post
Seconded, although 100+ seems a bit over the top: Textmaker goes for a lot less.
True, I was just saying what I would be willing to pay.

If software is good/stable and meets my needs, I'm quite happy to pay for it.

R.
==
__________________
* Nokia N800
* Nokia SU-8W Bluetooth keyboard
 
tabletrat's Avatar
Posts: 481 | Thanked: 65 times | Joined on Aug 2007 @ Westcountry, UK
#24
Originally Posted by Modulok View Post
The reason I will not develop software for the ITs is that I cannot develop for a Linux distro like Maemo. The rise and fall of this distro is controlled by closed software and hardware. Why should I use my free time for developing software which will run as long as Nokia wants to. Its just a matter of my philosophic viewpoint .
Its an interesting viewpoint, but in that case, why do you have one?

I will quite happily program for anything - I have some pocketPC, Mac & windows software. I just program what I want for what I have!

In fact I got this 770 as it was an £80 programmable computer.
 
Posts: 26 | Thanked: 1 time | Joined on May 2007
#25
I'd love to program for the N800, but there are two reasons why I currently don't:
  1. I don't know GTK (yet)
  2. I don't / won't have a development system

I don't have a computer at home, and my job will be ending soon, so my sole development platform will be going away. I'll have lots of free time soon, though, so I may take a look at on-device development (which I seem to recall seeing posted about somewhere) and learning GTK.
 
tabletrat's Avatar
Posts: 481 | Thanked: 65 times | Joined on Aug 2007 @ Westcountry, UK
#26
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
Heck, if I had the time, I'd rewire my brain from vb.net mode to a maemo-supported development platform and code all sorts of things for pure pleasure.
I program for pleasure (which is disturbing as I do it for a living).

Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
So to me the question is why isn't maemo enjoying the same level of developer activity that other Linux efforts do?
Well, they aren't very well established. I got mine as it was really cheap and someone mentioned it on some mac group. I have a couple of tabletPCs, and a few PDAs but for walking around the tablets are too big and the PDAs are a bit limited.
The problem is though that the internet tablet is still an idea that has yet to really take off.

It is also a complete pain to set the environment up, compared to other platforms.
 
Texrat's Avatar
Posts: 11,700 | Thanked: 10,045 times | Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA
#27
Nokia has already acknowledged the mistake in the 770 to N800 transition and declared that it won't be repeated.
 
tabletrat's Avatar
Posts: 481 | Thanked: 65 times | Joined on Aug 2007 @ Westcountry, UK
#28
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
Nokia has already acknowledged the mistake in the 770 to N800 transition and declared that it won't be repeated.
As I am new here, what were those mistakes? (i just have a 770)
 
ArnimS's Avatar
Posts: 1,107 | Thanked: 720 times | Joined on Mar 2007 @ Germany
#29
Sorry for the stupid thread title. It's been fun reading the comments though.

I suppose the maemo environment could be more complete, but it's not the purpose of the tablet to run *any* linux apps - the idea is to do proper ports to hildon.

That being said, time is limited, and a number of people would rather have a kludgy raw build than nothing. So if anybody is running into problems with missing dependencies and libraries, please post them here or in #maemo. I have built a bunch of libraries and tools that i can share, but webspace is limited.
 
Texrat's Avatar
Posts: 11,700 | Thanked: 10,045 times | Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA
#30
Originally Posted by tabletrat View Post
As I am new here, what were those mistakes? (i just have a 770)
Failure to implement adequate hardware abstraction, mainly.
 
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