Trolltech's full monty with open-source phone software
The open-source software specialist releases previously proprietary phone software components under the GPL and ports Qtopia to FIC's Neo1973 phone.
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Trolltech has been working for years on open-source software for Linux-based mobile phones, but the company took another step Tuesday by making its full package available as open source.
The software, called Qtopia Phone Edition, has been available under either open-source or commercial licenses, but the latter option included more features. "Until now some Qtopia components, like the telephony, DRM (digital rights management) and the safe execution environment software stacks, were only available under the commercial development license," the company said. Now, though, all the components will be available under version 2 of the open-source General Public License (GPL).
It sounds like there might be some useful code there for the "Gphone," Google's alleged mobile phone software effort.
Trolltech also said it's ported Qtopia to the Neo1973 mobile phone from the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer FIC. The effort employed software from OpenMoko, a company that's working on building a phone based on open-source software.