Totally reminds me of Linux

Qt bug report gets some love

A Qt bug report I submitted almost two years ago finally got a little attention and a status promotion from a Qt dev. Yay! That is all.

Firefox OS falling into the OEM trap?

Marty Eich over on RootzWiki deals with an issue that I mentioned in my previous post--namely that "open" in the mobile OS space has so far mostly been implemented as "open" for handset makers and carriers but not for end-users. Marty points out is that Firefox OS might have started pursuing this model as well, and that makes him (and me) uncomfortable.

I understand that without manufacturer and carrier interest any new mobile OS will be dead in the water, but let's not lose sight of the need to have a platform that's open for the end user. The two don't have to be mutually exclusive!

Why we need another smartphone OS

I'm going to step a little out of character in this post and respond to what might be nothing more than trolling. And in so doing I will probably engage in some myself. I am referring to a piece run on CNET today that asserts, "No, we don't really need another smartphone OS."

The work reads not unlike a piece of corporate protectionist propaganda, serving up the familiar, "It will be impossible for any newcomer to the mobile OS space to gain critical mass so they just better not try," stuff we've heard before. So, there's really nothing new in the content. What is new, or at least noteworthy, is the claim to address whether we need another smartphone OS--rather than how difficult a task it would be to build one--something that it pretty much fails to do. It entirely avoids the megaton gorilla that is the reason why we do need another OS: we currently lack a credible, open mobile platform. iOS is nowhere close to having any semblance of open; Android is effectively open only for vendors (not users)--and even then the OHA limits what you can do; and to the best of my knowledge Microsoft's and RIM's efforts are completely closed.

The rebuttal to the above is that, "Users don't actually care about open/free/libre/whateverness." And indeed this might be true. But it doesn't diminish the need for it. Honestly, I wonder if the titans of tech journalism are functionally concerned with the requirements of a healthy computing sociology or whether they are content acting merely as industrial spokespeople.

Jolla's Sailfish: MeeGo resurrected

Looks like today is mobile OS day. A little earlier I posted about my kindling interest in Firefox OS, and now I just read stories on Slashdot and Engadget  about Jolla's pending release of their MeeGo-based Sailfish operating system.

While sources claim Jolla's efforts are open source, I'm concerned about a line from a source linked to in the Slashdot article that states, "Jolla's plans will not include open sourcing [Sailfish's] user interface layer that it is building on top of the operating system platform." Which, of course, means that whatever Jolla ships won't be FOSS. At this point I have no idea if the non-FOSS UI layer is simply widget styling and branding (not a deal breaker) or something more crucial (potentially a deal-breaker). I hope to see this clarified soon.

An interesting difference/similarity between Firefox OS and Jolla is their marketing strategies. While Firefox OS seems to be targeting Sino-centric markets only obliquely (by targeting low-end hardware), Sailfish is targeting Chinese handsets directly. Just how this plays out globally will be interesting to watch.

Penguin meets canine: Firefox OS

I was originally somewhat dismissive of Mozilla's Firefox OS (née Boot to Gecko) as just a Google Chrome OS wannabe, but I've read a few things recently that suggest it's a platform with some good ideas that might actually gain some traction. While there seems to be limited buzz about it in $illyValley, and some are predicting very low penetration next year, I want to be optimistic that it will develop into a platform with some relevance.

I'm attracted to Firefox OS because unlike Google Chrome OS or Android it's all open all over the place, and unlike webOS it actually has institutional backing.*

FfOS's strategy is to target low-end smartphones and featurephones--a place that iOS will likely never go and where Android is going with only limited usability success. In addition to phones, I am wondering if FfOS might also be applicable to general embedded device development. Qt+QML seems to do nicely in this space, but I am more than slightly concerned about the future of Qt since being dumped by Nokia. webOS seems a good candidate for embedded work as well--as long as you subscribe to the webOS UI paradigm.

In any case, it's always nice to have viable alternatives, so I'll be rooting (!) for the ruddy canine.

*Looks like I might be wrong about this.

Fixing Qt appearance under XFCE 4.8 (aptosid)

On my aptosid setup running Xfce, Qt apps don't honor the GTK appearance setting without some help. The post at http://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=5605 provides a solution that worked for me:

# echo 'export GTK2_RC_FILES="$HOME/.gtkrc-2.0"' >> /etc/profile.d/qgtkstyle.sh
# chmod 755 /etc/profile.d/qgtkstyle.sh

then logout and back in.

With Xfce taking on increasing importance since the introduction of GNOME 3, I hope this will work out-of-the-box in the near future.