Handhelds, Linux and Heros

I got a nice loveletter from Mr. France of handhelds.org today - I do not think that I should quote him here ;-) But its a good reason to point interested people to two links. The first one is the letter of the USPTO in response to the GPE trademark application from 25. of June. A short summary of that letter is that hey did not accept the screenshot of the old hh.o GPE website as proof for GPE beeing used in commerce by hh.o and request a better specimen for a “GPE product”.

The second link is the page describing handhelds.org itself. The section “What we do not provide” gives us some information that hh.o does not sell any products - no hardware, no software and they do not even provide support. (In the case this page has some “accident” or suddenly changes I have a nice screenshot I can provide.)

So what’s the point here? Is there a secret hh.o product that suddenly pops up to fulfill the requirements for a trademark?

There are more reasons why this whole trademark story smells fishy:

• The date for the first use in commerce stated in the trademark application is a long time before hh.o Inc. was founded, at a time the platform was part of the CRL and the domain belonged to Kelly Martin. So who did this business? Compaq?
• Even if the hh.o website tells us that hh.o owns the GPE trademark this is not entirely true: The trademark was filed by George France personally and not by the non-profit handhelds.org Inc.
• Mr. France was never involved in GPE itself, only in administrating the servers used by GPE. Noone ever “donated” GPE to anyone and he simply has no right to claim GPE for himself.

Someone came up with the argument GPE was forked and did never move to LinuxToGo when this dispute started… well my answer was that future will give us clue about which of these opinions is right. From the time we moved till I was unsubscribed from the old GPE commits mailinglist today there was a single mail on this list - caused by Mr. France himself removing a file from the GPE CVS repository. I do not think that any honest person is able to speak about a fork in this case…

Graham announced a set of stable GPE binary packages for both Nokia 770 and N800 (the Gregale and Bora distributions). I just tried the Bora packages and can confirm that the packages seem to be fine. I have updated my install files for easy installation of all GPE components both from stable and experimental repository. These can be found here. Please don’t forget that you have to add the SDK feed before installing the applications - there is an install file for it too.

Many thanks for the packages and happy hacking!

 Update:  There are more binary packages avalilable: The Ångström distribution has updated GPE packages with all GPE 2.8 components  in its unstable feed now.

The release 2.8 of GPE is complete and available for download. The new release comes with a large number of bugfixes and improvements such as an improved calendar, many fixed import/export and synchronisation issues as well as support for Maemo in additional components like Starling (the new audio player) and gpe-filemanager.

The full announcement can be found here.

Many thanks to all the contributors that made this release possible!

Enjoy… and happy hacking :-)