Submission + - Tizen drops EFL for HTML5 (tizen.org) 1
DustyMutant writes: According to one of Tizen's architects Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler talking to user richrboo on the official project's IRC channel, there will be no option for native development in Tizen nor support for native apps in the application store. Rasterman is also co-author and benevolent dictator of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), customized by Samsung for the needs of its Linux platform that gave birth to Tizen in 2011. Tizen OS 1.0 is scheduled for the first quarter of 2012.
While Samsung never announced its roles in Tizen officially (or maybe because of that) Rasterman as Samsung's employee has been informally acting and the spokesperson or community manager for the project within the developer circles. Over a year ago he shared breaking news for open source enthusiasts: "Samsung is putting real resources behind EFL and using it to make a production-ready OS. The OS not only is Linux based, It uses all the other infrastructure from Linux [..] It is also going to be Open Source (GPL, LGPL etc.) and with Opensource upstream gaining contributions back from Samsung."
But last week Carsten admitted that he has already given up pushing EFL as the native GUI framework within Tizen and he does not care about that anymore. "I don't hear anything except 'the future is html5'. [..] So go make webapps and be happy as that is obviously the one and only true future. Go talk to the 'technical steering committee'." — he said apparently embittered.
This is second similar move in Tizen's history after notable removal of the Qt libraries and tools before reusing some other components from MeeGo late 2011. The move has polarized the communities and probably boosted creation of alternative projects such as Mer and Nemo. After the change EFL would be only used internally by some "system" applications like the system's web browser for the GUI. It was not disclosed how the OS will handle natively-running games that are not based on HTML5.
For open-source backers the project's reality is getting bitter every month. Tizen's upstream contributions are largely disputable because git history for the open source packages have never been published. And the fact that the SDK fueling Tizen is closed-source does not help to win more souls. It is not clear if the statement about merge of Tizen with the closed-source bada OS that hit the news in January was just a gossip. Now the state of Samsung's EFL contributions is uncertain. So if this is all true and Tizen goes full steam with Web-only approach, because of fundamental (not just technical) differences, it is hard to consider the project as a continuation of the MeeGo platform, contrary to what the sponsored Linux Foundation declares. But even more practical question can be: why is Tizen any better than other Web-based initiatives?
While Samsung never announced its roles in Tizen officially (or maybe because of that) Rasterman as Samsung's employee has been informally acting and the spokesperson or community manager for the project within the developer circles. Over a year ago he shared breaking news for open source enthusiasts: "Samsung is putting real resources behind EFL and using it to make a production-ready OS. The OS not only is Linux based, It uses all the other infrastructure from Linux [..] It is also going to be Open Source (GPL, LGPL etc.) and with Opensource upstream gaining contributions back from Samsung."
But last week Carsten admitted that he has already given up pushing EFL as the native GUI framework within Tizen and he does not care about that anymore. "I don't hear anything except 'the future is html5'. [..] So go make webapps and be happy as that is obviously the one and only true future. Go talk to the 'technical steering committee'." — he said apparently embittered.
This is second similar move in Tizen's history after notable removal of the Qt libraries and tools before reusing some other components from MeeGo late 2011. The move has polarized the communities and probably boosted creation of alternative projects such as Mer and Nemo. After the change EFL would be only used internally by some "system" applications like the system's web browser for the GUI. It was not disclosed how the OS will handle natively-running games that are not based on HTML5.
For open-source backers the project's reality is getting bitter every month. Tizen's upstream contributions are largely disputable because git history for the open source packages have never been published. And the fact that the SDK fueling Tizen is closed-source does not help to win more souls. It is not clear if the statement about merge of Tizen with the closed-source bada OS that hit the news in January was just a gossip. Now the state of Samsung's EFL contributions is uncertain. So if this is all true and Tizen goes full steam with Web-only approach, because of fundamental (not just technical) differences, it is hard to consider the project as a continuation of the MeeGo platform, contrary to what the sponsored Linux Foundation declares. But even more practical question can be: why is Tizen any better than other Web-based initiatives?
