Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri

Now that the list is published I can announce that my talk was approved and I’ll present at PyCon US 2009!

My talk Python enabling mobile media centers will tell you all how Python made it possible to finish Canola2 in record time and how it does not suck performance wise in mobile devices as the Nokia N800, N810 and it is even acceptable on 770! I’ll quickly cover how painful development of first version in C was, how we profiled, tools we used to write Python-EFL bindings and more.

For my beloved Brazilian friends, I plan to present it (or a similar talk) at Bossa Conference ‘09 and possible present it in Portuguese at PyCon-Brazil later this year.

Wow! Making it stronger WOW to let you all know how I did feel when I received the excellent news: Qt 4.5 will be LGPL 2.1 (see official here).

I still remember myself talking to Mark Shuttleworth about possibility of Qt going LGPL and I was saying that it would never become LGPL since it was an excellent thing for Nokia, keeping adversaries away.

It turned out that I was wrong… “never say never!” they say. Nokia is seems so confident, or Motorola so non-intimidating, that it believes that doing the right thing and moving its product license to more commercial friendly will bring more developers and thus more applications.

Mark was wondering about GNOME goals could be delivered on top of Qt if this was LGPL. Well, in my opinion it is possible, but very unlikely. I dare to say GTK will get going along Qt and it will never go away. It’s about passion, not technology there.

Talking about technology and this concerns ProFUSION, I really like Qt, always did. As most of you know I hack using Qt, GTK and EFL for a long time, Qt is the easiest to use, largest and most complete library out there. And following their progress with 4.x versions you can see they’re heading the right direction, heading where EFL or MacOS libraries are today. ProFUSION will now be able to recommend Qt to a broader range of clients, those that wanted LGPL licenses to avoid licensing fees.

I’m still surprised! I expect Nokia keep doing these great surprises, the next being the next internet tablets (with $99 developer program ) and maybe a Linux phone later this year!

I like them and I see why they’re the next big thing in hardware. They fit a nice spot, possible a better one than mobile internet devices/internet tablets: while they’re not as portable, they have a bigger screen, (almost) usable keyboard, more powerful cpu and bigger memory.

For geeks like me I guess it can easily replace laptops: I mostly use terminal with ssh + screen to our server, e17 as window manager (very light and fast), emacs for anything that requires me to edit, icecream/distcc to compile. Of course Firefox still don’t play well with memory and cpu, but I still have hope this bloat will go away some day. Since these netbooks have VGA port, we can easily simulate dockstations with usb keyboard+mouse and a bigger monitor. Long battery lifes are also a great thing to me. I still want to get one, but maybe I’ll wait one with ARM cpu (hopefully even longer battery life) and possible 3g as well, then let’s see if I can forget about my laptop as I did with my desktop some years ago.

But this post is also meant to highlight that non-geeks also like them! I was walking at a Brazilian mall the other day and spotted more than once some old women (the less tech-lovers out there) pointing eeepcs and saying they’d love to have those: they’re white, they’re small, “they’re soooooo cute” in their own words. Needless to say men of all ages and younger girls like these kind of toy too.

In my opinion Netbooks area is where Linux can gain great market share. Actually the market is still very small, but growing fast and Linux is there from beginning. Netbooks are not restricted to x86, so Linux can show its flexibility running on ARM and MIPS, areas where standard Windows does not play. Applications are not the same, or expected to be the same, people are not demanding heavyweight office applications, but they do demand excellent internet experience, and Firefox/Webkit technologies (not the apps!) do great there. Pidgin (libpurple or Telepathy) and other tools will help there, as well as our great multimedia platforms with MPlayer, Xine, GStreamer, VLC…

Another great thing about netbooks is that they’re cheap. Even in Brazil where everything imported is overtaxed, they’re acceptable. So people are willing to get one without fear of wasting too much money on something.

And  let’s remember we’re talking about a new product! So it’s more expensive than what it will be in few months, you don’t see internet addicts using it at the mall and here in Brazil you see no advertisement about them, expect more buzz when this happen. It’s a exciting technology, stay tuned!