Funambol and Trolltech

Funambol hired another Stefano a few weeks ago (our CTO was worried they could outnumber the Andreas), Stefano Maffulli, as our community manager. He comes from the FSF, so he is a guarantee for keeping our tight-rope walker well balanced on open source.

He has a cool blog at http://maffulli.net/ which I guess will start hosting more mobile stuff than before (welcome to mobile open source ;-)

His last post is about Trolltech and Funambol, an initiative I find quite interesting, in particular after the acquisition of Trolltech by Nokia (which is already a partner and a customer of Funambol, BTW).

Why wait until summer to code and earn $3,000? Funambol has just announced the availability of a $3,000 bounty to develop a plugin to allow Funambol to run on Qtopia devices. Trolltech, the makers of Qtopia, was just acquired this week by Nokia and as a result, Qtopia will become more commonly used.

Trolltech and Funambol would like to make sure that Funambol software works on Qtopia, so we are happy to provide you with a free Trolltech Green Phone or OpenMoko phone, a free Trolltech SDK and, of ourse, Funambol software. This would involve developing a plug-in to sync PIM data (contacts and calendar to start with) and maybe push email later.

If interested, follow the procedure on the code sniper page and submit a proposal.

Developers looking for information on Funambol’s code should look at Funambol’s wiki and at code from other community contributions (like the Android plugin, for example or the simpler Jajah plugin).

It should be fun, do not miss it.