Nokia Gives Some Hints On the Future of Qt

An anonymous reader writes "Continuing the damage control following the announcement of the Nokia-Microsoft partnership, Nokia has a post on their official blog outlining the future of Qt which includes some (cherry picked) comments from Qt users. Phil from Nokia writes, 'Lots of great questions and comments coming from you all on the future of Qt. One thing is for sure: Qt remains to play an important role in Nokia. We'll have more Qt-related posts coming this week during Mobile World Congress, but for the time being, the Director of Qt's ecosystem, Daniel Kihlberg, wrote a post on Qt's official blog on the future of Qt.'" An anonymous reader points to one unattractive possible future for Qt.

Comments

Fork

[Daniel Phillips]

The only possible scenario for QT under Microsoft's control is gamesmanship to dilute it and undermine its usefulness to KDE and other open source projects. The only rational response is a quick and clean fork under a new name. In this way QT will develop better and faster than it ever has before, guided by the needs of a community and not handicapped by the vagaries of corporate politics. This has to be spearheaded by the KDE project, the largest participant in the QT ecosystem.

Re:Fork

[SwedishPenguin]

They've already announced that Qt won't be ported to WP7, which to me seems like suicide.. They pushed Qt hard as their unified development platform for all their devices, a lot of people learned it and loved it, and now they're completely abandoning that strategy. A move like this really upsets developers, and I think they're much more likely to move to Android now than to develop for WP7...

Gag me.

[lexidation]

Lots of great questions and comments coming from you all on the future of Qt. One thing is for sure: Qt remains to play an important role in Nokia. We’ll have more Qt-related posts coming this week during Mobile World Congress...

I'm used to PR people spray painting happy faces all over everything, but this is some of the gaggiest PR barf I've had spilled in my path.

Fool me once

[Compaqt]

Back last autumn, Nokia had promised that it had finally gotten its platform house in order:

-S40 for dirt-cheap phones. No apps anyway, so it doesn't matter for developers.
-Symbian for feature phones.
-And Meego for advanced phones and devices.

But devs would only have to use one platform (Qt) to target both Symbian and Meego. Oh, and Qt will also run on Win/Mac/Lin. Icing on top.

That's a story. And after all the bungling, it looked like devs and users would forgive Nokia, and give it another shot.

But now, it changes the platform story once again. No stability. No trust. And no reason why users and devs shouldn't abandon Nokia for Android.

Re:Fool me once

[imroy]

Back last autumn, Nokia had promised that it had finally gotten its platform house in order

That would have been before Stephen Elop, former Microsoft executive, became the president and CEO of Nokia?

Re:Fool me once

[Paradise Pete]

Instead we are seeing the slow-motion theft and destruction of the entire company. It started with appeasement. Then this move, accompanied by some BS hand-waving about the future of the other technology. That was necessary to keep the in-house people from a full-scale revolt. Then those systems will be, when the time is right, "deprecated," and divisions laid off, and it becomes an all-Microsoft OS operation. The company will steadily lose market share and money and eventually get bought for a song, ala Palm. But along the way they'll have shoveled a big pile of money Microsoft's way, while at the same time allowing Microsoft to prolong its own fantasy of being relevant in the future.

Re:This is probably great news for Qt

[PixetaledPikachu]

But we all know Microsoft doesn't like cross-platform.

Yep, that's why the .NET framework is designed to be platform agnostic and the whole thing is submitted to ECMA and ISO for standardization

Yes yes, The OOXML is also ECMA certified. Do you see where I'm going with this?

Re:Why is this a bad thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's people like you that make real Linux and open source people look bad.

Re:This is probably great news for Qt

[davester666]

Yeah. There will be exactly one first class implementation, available on one operating system [Windows].

Then there will be partial implementations elsewhere.

For an example of this see...Microsoft SilverLight.

good luck with that

[t2t10]

The retention of Nokia’s 200 million Symbian-users is vital

Yeah, it is. Good luck with that. You effectively just canceled their platform (Symbian) and the only platform with any viable migration strategy (MeeGo). You also just removed the incentive for developers to create new apps for the Symbian platform.

You could have done something special by turning MeeGo into a platform that allows users to run Symbian, Qt, and Android, giving people a viable migration path. But none of that is going to happen with Windows Phone 7. And nobody is going to believe you are going to keep spending money on MeeGo now that you are in Microsoft's pocket and have your company run by an ex-Microsoft exec.

Developers are perceiving that MeeGo is dead, and with it, Qt is dead for your products. You might as well stop investing money in them now.

Re:Nope, scroll down, not going to be ported to WP

[NuShrike]

How do you port something that entirely depends on access to the underlying native APIs to an environment whose whole purpose is to keep you away from the native API? As so far as not even have a native programming layer.

Qt's rendering is almost centered around OpenGL and shaders. Porting to Direct* is going to a huge setback, and it's not even available on Wimpy7s either!

That is already a measure of how immature Wimpy7s is.

Re:Take a deep breath

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh. Right. Wormtongue has moved into the palace and set up housekeeping, but no, Saruman's not in charge, or anything.

Re:Why is this a bad thing?

[Daniel Phillips]

I had great hope that the new CEO would have shed - attachment to his former employer.
Looks to me he's still in love with microsoft.

His actions are those of a Microsoft employee and apparently he is one of the largest owners of Microsoft stock. If this doesn't cause a shareholder lawsuit then Finnland might as well go back to making paper.

Re:Erm... What exactly are they saying about MeeGo

[TheRaven64]

For the N900? I was on the open source developer program for the 770. About a year after I got mine (a week before the official release), they released an update to the OS that only ran on the newer model. It was eventually back-ported as a 'community edition', but it was clear that Nokia had no interest in supporting older devices - if you weren't buying a new one each year, they didn't want to know.

Trying to replace Symbian with Linux was an incredibly stupid idea. The Symbian kernel has better power management, lower memory usage, a cleaner capabilities model, better realtime support, and the microkernel design scales nicely to multicore phones (the kernel services are all in largely independent processes already). The only bad thing about it was the old C++ APIs that were heavily optimised for devices with under 4MB of RAM and made life hard for programmers who didn't care about obsessive-compulsive memory conservation, but you've been able to program for Symbian without going near these for some time now.

They even had a POSIX subsystem for Symbian that would have been used to port *NIX apps (no fork(), but most code uses vfork() anyway).

Re:Take a deep breath

[21mhz]

Right, like it happened to HTC. The poor Taiwanese didn't even get a worthy mobile platform from MS, so they had to bet their success on goddamned Windows Mobile. And once they were locked in, it was near impossible to jump to a better choice (for them) when it presented itself.