IBM Picks Qtopia Over PalmOS And PocketPC 285
Bill Kendrick writes "ZDNet,
Geek.com and others are reporting IBM's decision to choose Trolltech's Qtopia (the embedded version of their Qt library, used by the Sharp Zaurus PDA) in their forthcoming devices.
See the announcement at Trolltech's website, and an
earlier press release at IBM.com." Here's an earlier post about the new IBM reference platform.
Why not Linux? (Score:1, Interesting)
linux just won (Score:2, Interesting)
And we know what happened that last time ibm released a pc reference platform.
I would say that linux just won the future.
and the future is wareable -peace yall.
- the final invention says that
" we'll make great pets."
Syncs with all OSes, opensource OS (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, Qtopia is open source... I think I want a Qtopia device now
Huge! (Score:4, Interesting)
They deserve this success too. They have given us QT, which IMO is THE BEST Application Framework for C++ ever developed.
However I'm wondering if there isn't another faction inside IBM that we haven't heard about... waiting to kill off anything that isn't Windows based (sort of like what happened with the IBM PC Co and OS/2).
Seems like a no brainer. (Score:2, Interesting)
Lets ignore all the security issues for a moment. Let's just imagine that MS finally makes something truly secure, and no one is going to be hacking your phone or PDA.
The primary issues then become functionality and memory footprint. In terms of low cost buying power, you can't beat linux. In terms of memory scalability, you can't beat linux.
Add in stability, and the reality of security, and it seems wierd that anyone would go another direction.
Re:X-less QT (Score:1, Interesting)
It doesn't have to be. The Pico X server running on my ipaq is tiny (I could tell you exactly how big, but the piece of junk's battery is dead - as usual). We're talking less than a megabyte. I've tried running Qt and for me, the lack of an X server makes it less than useless (I know you can run it over X, but it's a hack - and I know you can use VNC, but the client's not always available). The applications are pretty, the syncronization would be nice if I had any windows boxes (or Evolution) to sync against, but I prefer having X, the Matchbox WM and the applications that I want to run. GPE (like Qtopia) is all well and good, but all you need is a menu system to launch apps, you don't need to copy how Palm behaves.
Re:Quite a shift (Score:3, Interesting)
Well that's assuming you don't count their long lived involvment in semiconductor development. You could say that they've been at both ends of the size spectrum for quite a while now. Notice that it is their semiconductor involvement that is pushing this decision (pushing their PPC405LP). They've also been making drives for a great long while now as well, the pocket drive is a natural evolution. So in many ways, things haven't changed at all
Is IBM serious about the PDA market? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope, this looks like IBM pushing their PPC405 into the embedded market, any resemblence to a pda is purely incidental.
Re:Then that's not GPL... (Score:1, Interesting)
I agree... I cannot see how one cannot use GPL qt library for linux to create commercial Linux apps. Apparently there is no GPL version of the Qt/Windows though.
Also it is odd that TrollTech's website says that one still needs a commercial license to use qt apps for internal use in a commercial company (that is even if you don't sell the product, but just use it).
Can anyone with more information regarding how TrollTech licenses Qt enlighten us?
Re:Quite a shift (Score:5, Interesting)
It was Microsoft who wrestled the computer world from the headlock IBM had it in.
This is almost certainly a troll, but for those who might share the same misapprehension, it's worth pointing out that the above statement is completely false.
If there is a single cause of IBM's loss of control (and, actually, the company still is a monopoly in some spaces, though a relatively well-behaved one), it's the US Department of Justice. The consent decree IBM signed forced the company to stop bundling, which pretty much gutted the company's market strategy. If you want to add a second reason, it's the emergence of the personal computer, but the fact that IBM didn't retain control of that market is also largely attributable to the consent decree. At the time the IBM PC came out, IBM was deeply mired in red ink and floundering badly, which was a lot of the reason why IBM never put any real focus on the PC market and ended up giving it to Microsoft instead.
The reason that the DOJ hasn't had a similar effect on Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior, of course, is that Microsoft chose to ignore its consent decree and force the DOJ to make it stick in court, which has been so difficult, expensive and time-consuming that the US government has pretty much lost the will to press the charges home.
Re:Then that's not GPL... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, it is encouraged that you support Trolltech if you are benefitting from their library. It's not every day that a company gives you their entire flagship product as open source. Plus their support is usually pretty good
Re:X-less QT (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not qualified to hold forth on the pros and cons of X but will point out this: when using MacOS X, it is such a relief to have a display system that just works. Want antialiasing? Just turn it on! Most users wouldn't even know it's something to which thought might be given, as opposed to desktop Linux use, where fighting XFree becomes an activity in its own right.
(And I still have XFree available on OS X for GIMP and remote Matlab sessions...)
Re:Quite a shift (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe I'm wrong, but I seem to recall IBM deliberately crippling the PC platform at the beginning in order to prevent it from eating at their mainframe sales.
I've never heard of anything like this, and I can't think what in the PC might have qualified as "crippled". I certainly don't believe that many in IBM were concerned with PCs (which were considered little better than toys) eating into their mainframe sales.
Wouldn't it really be the clonemakers who opened the 8088 architecture with cloned BIOSes and IBM-compatible hardware?
They're the ones who ate IBM's lunch in the PC hardware market, sure, but I have to think that if IBM had really been at the top of their game they'd have recognized the opportunity for software sales. Or not. My point was that they couldn't be bothered because the company was in serious trouble and had bigger fish to fry.
I was only a kid at the time, but I distinctly remember there being two factions in the PC world at the beginning. The evil IBM empire with sidekick Compaq, who were selling their machines at extremely high prices, and the rest of the clone world.
Well, I was more or less a kid at the time as well, but I'm pretty sure at least one part of this is wrong -- Compaq wasn't IBM's "sidekick". Compaq was the company that reverse-engineered IBM's machines, which couldn't have made IBM very happy.
IBM did try to regain control of the architecture with the PS/2, but the higher price of the hardware for the platform (general rule, add $100 for any PS/2 component as compared to an ISA or EISA version of the time) killed the interest.
Yep, but I'd say this is just another facet of the fact that IBM really couldn't be bothered. Sure, the people in the PC division tried to do what they could but they weren't given the money or the tools they needed to really find a winning strategy (which clearly wasn't in selling the hardware; IBM always has been a company that focuses on high-margin business).
PDA or Other? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:crazy (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah, not quite! Just as the presence of Athlons does not mean there are no embedded x86 Elans, the presence of the G4 doesn't mean there are no embedded PowerPCs! Don't confuse the architecture (PowerPC) with the implementation (G4).
The PowerPC has long been a staple of the embedded commuity (by 'long' here I mean 'half a decade or so'
The PowerPC's proven itself to be an astoundingly flexible architecture, and if IBM says they've got a low-power-consumption chip, I'd believe it, even if they posted good performance figures. As with the ARM, which was also not originally an embedded chip, performance and power consumption are not -always- mutually exclusive.
Also, as far as Linux on the PDA is concerned...I run Linux on my iPaq (and use it as a PDA) and have found it to be smaller and more stable than WinCE, and more stable (though larger) than PalmOS. My distribution of Linux fits handily into 16M of flash, and that includes Qtopia, all my PIM apps, Konqueror, Kinkatta (an AIM client), and various wlan mapping tools. Even my non-Linux friends prefer my 'feudal' Linux PDA -- and this was put together by a bunch of volunteers. I'm really looking forward to see what IBM's got.
Qtopia/Zaurus (Score:2, Interesting)
Just my 2 units of currency..
Saddening (Score:1, Interesting)
I also find it anoying that QT provides wrappers for MacOS' and Windows' existing UIs but on LINUX it creates it's own right down until it touches the windowing system instead of merly providing a wrapper on top of a community supported one (I know QT is older than GTK but there were others before it).
The whole multiple UI systems would be fixed if QT was just made into a wrapper for GTK+ (the reverse would be inpossible because of both licensing and language binding/archetecture issues, although if it wasn't it would be a just as good)
I challenge Trolltech to do this. They would still be able to keep charging royalties to developers using their cross platform wrapper (which is what they advetise to be QT's greatest strength.
As for Qtopia, it has no open source competitors, so the only reasonable solution is to stomach it for the time being, but to have a UI that is owned by a company that seeks to make a profit by restricing it's use seems to me as an unacceptable future for an operating system. Hell even M$ doesn't charge money for people to compile closed source stuff on windows. It seems to me even more laughable that some people consider a UI that costs money for static linking or porting to other OS's as a suitable base library for a free OS like LINUX, it just has no future.