WhyOpie

= Why Opie was created (The History) =

1. Sharp contracted Trolltech to create Qtopia based on the QPE demo hack
Trolltech started QPE as a Demo for promoting Qt/E to illustrate how easy it would be to use the Qt Toolkit to form a whole embedded platform. Starting with the QPE floppy disk edition, the Familiar Linux users created interest in QPE for their iPAQ devices. But suddenly Trolltech's commitment seemed to drop. The public CVS at sourceforge had no commits, Familiar evolved and triggered new issues. The reason for that was that Sharp wanted to create a Java based PDA, but it must have been dog slow and some of the technicians started trying QPE on their what would become the Zaurus devices. Sharp contracted Trolltech to make QPE a product instead of a demo/project. Sharp Japan needed a new GUI tested and ready _now_, so the very small Australian office of Trolltech was busy fixing bugs through the holidays. Sourceforge CVS had to be abandoned because it was too much work for the small team of developers at Trolltech AU to maintain internal commits as well as external commits to sf. Sharp, like all hardware companies, demanded confidentiality, Trolltech released Qpe (later Qtopia) under a dual license scheme, much like Qt.

2. The iPAQ community felt left out
The iPAQ community didn't know what had happened because Trolltech could not publish any details about their deal with Sharp. Just from a pragmatic point of view something had to be done to have improvements, to have bugs fixed, to get people working on the code.

3. The Qtopia Developer Contest was announced
The SL-5000d was announced and people were very keen to get their hands on such a device. Suddenly the iPAQ folks knew what Trolltech was up to, and as the Linux iPAQ people were a community already and did work on the Kernel, X, GNOME, KDE and many other projects before, they saw a need to have a FreeSoftware platform as a base for handheld devices. The SL-5000d shipped with QPE 1.5, but the latest CVS version was still 1.4. So a FreeSoftware project was founded to create a completely Free platform with strong community support and involvement. With handhelds.org and HP/Compaq/CRL there already was someone who had a platform to use and give resources to projects.

4. Opie was created
The OPIE-Project was founded. The latest SourceForge CVS tree of QPE 1.4 was imported at handhelds.org, opie.handhelds.org created, mailing list and bug tracker was set up and people gathered on freenode to chat about Opie, the Zaurus and their ideas. Many ideas were implemented, syncing tools created, new applications, new libraries, many translation, new support for devices. Opie has integrated features from Qtopia over the years, since Trolltech does make regular GPL'd releases of Qtopia.

= Why we developed Opie instead of adopting Qtopia 2.x =


 * We felt the Qtopia application framework lacked in some important areas - these are the classes that libopie2 supplies.
 * We were not satisfied with some of the design (as in software design, not necessarily just UI) decisions that Trolltech made.
 * We didn't want to limit our contribution to just applications, we also wanted to improve core and library code as well.