Hi,

I'm starting to develop an application to easily check the time remaining for a bus to reach a specific bus stop. It will only be really useful to the people of my city, Zaragoza (Spain). To know that info my app downloads a webpage form the bus company's website and it process it so it's more user-friendly and quick that entering the website itself.

I'm planing to make some improvements over it, but as I don't know how much free time will I have to work on it I don't know how far I will go... I'm developing with QTcreator and I have tested it in maemo, linux and windows (I hope to test it under symbian soon).


I'm thinking on publishing it once it is more polished and with more features under the GPLv3. As I don't know how many people in my town has a N900 my primary target would be Symbian, so much more people would be able to use it... for example, the 5800 XpressMusic is fairly popular. There are similar apps for iPhone and Android, but not for Nokia phones or any desktop OS.

Now the questions. I'm an advocate of free software (free as in "free speech", not as in "free beer"), so I'm planning on releasing the code for anyone who wants to compile or hack it (or even redistribute it), but is that incompatible to selling the binary in the Ovi Store? (something cheap, like 1€). I have seen for example that the app "flightcomputer" is available in the Store for 1.06€ and also it's in the maemo repositories for free (I'm assuming it's the same version, but I haven't tried it).

I see this as a pretty fair distribution model so people how are very happy with the app or don't know/want to compile it can have it for a small price, while people who want see/hack the code (or simply don't want to pay) can have it with all the liberties the GPL offer...

I'm not thinking in making money, but it would be great to see at least part of my work rewarded and even be able to buy the next meego device! :-)

On the technical level, is easy to publish in the Ovi Store? how do they test an app before releasing it? any advice or thoughts?

Any of the above is unmovable, maybe I release it only in the maemo repositories or maybe I even don't release it if there are no people interested in it...

Thanks (and sorry for the super-long post!)