This is a blog from the Open Nordic conference in Skien Norway 19-20 june 2008.
Trolltech: 14 years of history. Founded in Oslo 1994. Recently
aquired by Nokia. 217 mill. NOK (revenue?). Will continue to
support hundres of thousands open source developers. Nokia will base
their developent stuf on Debian.
The business model:
Dual licensing. GPL for GPL usage. Commercial
terms for commercial use. Some products, multiple licenses..
Virtous cycle: Develops produts. Release beta versions. Community
feedback (more than 50% of bug reports from open source people, KDE
very significant in this respect). Rapid product stabilization.
Final release sell to customrs. Sales fund further development.
Shows slides of state of the art in UI widgets 1996.
Kool Desktop Environment: Wanted games, impress his girlfriend ;)
Also, "hello world" was 300 lines code.
Whacking at it for 12 years. Nothing reaching the level of
depoloyment KDE is pulling off.
Without KDE Trolltech would be tinytech. So opens ource is good for
Trolltech:
Many people herad about QT through KDE and open source. 1/3
customers buy after trying free version.
Knut rants a bit about music industry DRM and copying madness :-)
Trolltech inverts this, and says that free copies is good marketing
and good development practice.
KDE´s adoption gives cred. bugreports. Many contributions:
Phonon and webkit.
Trolltech helps KDE
Good development tools. Engeneering team of 100 peope doing boring
work. Sponsors KDE developers. Trolltech system commit
components to other projects. Example: Font rendering in
Firefox. Font rendering in OLPC. KDE deelpers have a hotline to
Trolltech, and influence Qt releses.
Question: Does KDE requirements make problems for Qt developers (too
dominant customer). Answer: No ;) The question is rised from time to time, but it is not perceived to be problem.
Cross plattform: Same API across desktop, embedded and mobile.
Provides a GUGI emulation layer. Need to follow a lot of GUIs ;)
(vista, Mac, KDE, Motif etc.) Covering desktops and devices with this
approach. Probably why Nokia did this, so developer don´t have to
think about all this.
The web kit story:
1998 KDE cleaned up their web engine, making KHTML.
2003 Applea nnounce webkit for Safarei, beuilt on KHTML
2005 webkit and khtml diverged, apple submittd code in bulks
(difficult to keep up).
Apple opened up developemtn june 7 2005. A week later nokia
announced web browser S60 made with webkit.
KHTML people a bit crossed. There was a fork between webkit and
KHTML, but in 2005 they opened up like a good open source project
is supposed to do. An employee made the Nokia S60 browser in one
night, on his own time. After that it was adapted by Nokia proper.
2005 support for SVG. 2006/2007 webkit tested at Trolltech´s
creative Fridays. Jun 2007 windows port. jul 2007 KDE team moves
to webkit May 2008 Trolltech integrates webkit.
Demo: Playing Anthony Rother playing on Amarok. Displaying ewbkit
components in the user interface. Mixing elements, getting cover art
from Amazon. Embedding web elements into applications. Blurring the
borders between applications and browsers.
Comment: I see why this (letting you integrate your web pages into any
application) is a good idea: It lets you control stuff on the backend
way simpler than you can from a sandboxed browser, while you still let
the rendering being done like normal web rendering. The alternative
would be to break open the browser sandbox, and let it access system
resources quite freely (in essence writing a sandbox-breaking plugin).
Two ways of doing things, chose one that fits.
Market share data:
Using ccid consulting source
Perhaps this url: http://linudxevices.com/news/NS941975362517.html
(silly number)
Realtime games:
Most popular game in England: Bingo. Mention university of
Lancaster, using bluetooth connectivity example: When in proximity
of a friend, your phone starts to vibrate, you have to pull it out
and pull the trigger. Two pictures "shooting you", "Booom". Very
very simple game, but interesting gameplay. You don´t need cool
graphics to make interesting games.
Showing student examples: Battleship and tower of devense. Knut believes that gaming will be a big thing on phones ;)
Internet enabled applications with webkit, making it easy to program the devices.
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