Linked by David Adams on Thu 28th May 2009 16:12 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless Here at OSNews we believe that in many ways the future of computing is mobile. It's also a pretty exciting field, since it's been so dynamic over the past ten years, with platforms rising and falling, and no one vendor ever rising to dominate. But this "wild west" market can be a real source of anxiety for mobile-oriented software developers, who have to gamble on which platform to support, or go to the extra effort of placing multiple bets. Maybe it's not a huge problem for hobbyists or developers of simplistic apps, but as the devices get more powerful, it's enabling the development of more powerful apps. If only these developers could develop a sophisticated mobile app that could be deployed on all the major mobile platforms. Now they can. There's an open mobile framework called Rhodes that allows developers to write an app that will deploy on iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android.
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RE[4]: Startup
by adamblum on Sat 30th May 2009 04:57 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Startup"
adamblum
Member since:
2009-05-30

Hmmm... in 2009, is the value of GPL licensed software really still being questioned? Qt and MySQL are huge boons to the development community, that I've benefitted from on projects many times. But valuable GPL software is all over the industry. If you believe in open source, by all means, open source your app. And then you owe nothing to use that GPL licensed product. Not sure if understand what your issue.

Regarding being a startup, the big open source wins (perhaps with the exception of Apache) are primarily from startups. PHP's 8 millions developers: a startup. MySQL millions of users: a startup, Qt: a startup. I'm actually continually surprised how infrequently big companies (even ones that are perceived as benevolent) contribute to open source, despite the massive value some of them garner from it.

But any such startup's backers just have to be prepared to be in it for the long haul (as in as much as ten years). Any intelligent startup's founders won't go into the deal without that commitment. I have seen plenty of underfunded, undercommitted startups with proprietary stuff, but I haven't seen any open source companies recently without backers prepared for the necessary timeframe.

I agree with what was said about the importance of the development community. Rhomobile has a bunch of great devs in the community contributing already and we hope you guys decide to be part of that.

Cheers,

- Adam

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