Many people make a big deal about open source and open software. But FAR more important than that is open standards for hardware and software and *portability* for software. The game console platform industry has shown this quite clearly. With the advent of higher performance consoles, and more portable coding games now often release on many platforms at once. Portable software tool kits won’t necessarily do everything, but they sure help one hell of a lot!

The OLPC project has had some tough times http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi gets into some of that and some forays into other things. The area about Qt/Trolltech supporting Windows as well as Linux is what prompted this post as well as the overall tone around there that ultimately software rarely doesn’t, and *SHOULD NOT* care about the kernel. Hell it shouldn’t have to care about the UI much at all, that should be left up to the windowing environment. You should be able to indicate hot keys and get the windowing UI to mostly just handle it. And guess what? That’s mostly how OS/X works. Unfortunately it’s windowing API and system are only found on OS/X, as are the majority of it’s APIs.