On Nov 11, 2007, at 10:45 PM, Xiaofan Chen wrote:

> It is not open enough but I think Nokia and other Symbian
> based smart phones are still open enough for the developers.

But they make up a very small minority of the actual phones
out there, right?  "smart phones" are such a tiny niche to
start with...


> Still for majority of the open source projects, Linux is
> the first priority to support, followed by Windows and
> then perhaps Mac OS X.

I could argue that Windows SHOULD be the first priority to
support, and people don't for "religious reasons."  Gratuitous
incompatibility is annoying (perhaps unavoidable in GUI apps?),
but I thought what Cadsoft did with their first Mac EAGLE offering
was a sort of ideal compromise - offer a linux/X application
compiled to run in the Mac environment.  I'm a little worried
that their next release will have a native mac version; I'm not
sure there's enough of a Mac EAGLE user community to justify or
support such an effort.

> I am not so sure if gpsim works for Mac right out of
> the box or not.

I found my efforts to get gpsim working under 10.3.9 sufficiently
painful (GUI library dependency hell) that I have not tried again
now that I'm running 10.4.  But the CLI utilities work ok.  (a sad
example of the difficulties of open source.  In theory, I could just
recompile and run.  In practice, it needed LOTS of libraries to be
imported, and some of them conflicted version-wise with what the
local mac environment seemed to need.  Likewise, getting gerbv
compiled required downloading over a gigabyte of unlikely software
including TeX and Ghostscript.  Sigh.)

BillW

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