Quote:
|
Originally Posted by jęd
Did he...? Al I saw where some tweaks to the PDF reader, and ports of calculators. Not exacty ground-breaking stuff... The rest (the bluetooth projec, a port of an email client, and rtf support) all seem vaporware...
|
He did. While I agree that he's a little bit strong on the talking side, he actually produced a lot. Setting up and explaining a build environment, digging into the undocumented sources, and uncovering the Iliad's software details is a lot of work and the foundation for any porting/programming project. It produces nothing that's visible to the user, but is a substantial chunk of the work that's required to get new software for the Iliad.
Reg. the car metaphor: The people who want everything open do that because it was announced so, though implicitly. If you buy a desktop computer from, say, Dell, with Windows on it, you can expect to get original, licensed, legal software. That is, you can expect that Dell paid their dues to Microsoft to be in the legal position to install Windows on the PC you buy there. And I expected to get a legal operating system plus SDK, and I didn't. The Iliad software can only be distributed legally if you publish your sources.
Reg. "understanding" not showing your sources: If the business model begins with "we steal some software" - then I don't care about the rest. No understanding, no sympathy. If you want to sell a closed system, you are free to do so - just buy software that allows it.
Reg. "basing the Iliad on some PDA": They did. Hardware design is close to Zaurus/Ipaq/.... The software and operating system is essentially OpenEmbedded/OpenZaurus stuff. (You didn't think iRex made their software themselves, did you?)
On the other hand, I heard (actually in the beginning of december) that the FSF Europe made some moves towards iRex, and that there will be some GPL/MPL-compliant release in February. Perhaps things get better then, though it means that iRex first scares away the developers, then releases sources afterwards. Sounds like perfect iRex logic. And I'm sure they will promote that release as a big, friendly, oh-we-are-so-nice-let's-group-hug step just out of pure kindness.