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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.
Will Nokia send a takedown notice to that parody of their documentation website? Or just grin and bear it?
Parody by regexp.... I love it!
KDE's Qt developers should split off and form a separate company -- named Trolltech -- and continue work on a forked Qt.
Microsoft is undoubtedly a big player in the software industry. If they add it to Visual Studio and makes Qt a first-class .Net citizen I can't see anything bad coming out of this for Qt and Qt developers.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/12/nokias-marginalization-of-meego-came-as-a-surprise-to-intel/
I wonder whether there is any point in continuing on with QT? I mean it's awesome and all *now*, but will still be awesome after one year of neglect?
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
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.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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.
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.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I would love to hear all the reasons this is such a bad thing.
Why Nokia getting into bed with MSFT is bad:
In a single stroke, three high-profile open-source components are potentially endangered. If you care about open-source, this is a bad thing.
Uh... "for future disruption"? What does that mean?
And "will continue with MeeGo as an open source project".... Does that mean the community of folks who buy it have to provide their own updates, much like what has happened with the N900?
Program Intellivision!
Don't worry. Most of the people who actually cared about OSS left Slashdot quite a while ago. There's only a few of us left these days.
How is it Microsoft's fault if Apple doesn't let Firefox on iPhone?
Besides, Opera Mini is available for iOS. I'm sure if Opera gets in, Firefox does too.
I thought Nokia had come to its senses. I thought they were defining Symbian as legacy, MeeGo as dead, and moving on to Windows Mobile 7 as the ecosystem of choice going forward with a full partnership in helping to define what Windows Mobile 7 was.
Now I see Nokia is traveling down all three paths. What? This will work out for them every bit as well as Palm supporting both PalmOS and WinCE, never producing a great device for either OS and then eventually being subsumed by HP (although I have to admit that I do like WebOS).
I posted that I thought it was a triumph for MS and Nokia, that together they had amazing strengths that would propel them both forward. But I'm making a note here - if they (either!) aren't willing to let go of the legacy baggage that hangs about them, they are just so many WKRP turkeys stepping out of the helicopter wing in wing, dropping from the mobile ether. onto the parked cars of failed mobile devices below.
Goodnight, Nokia. Goodnight, Microsoft. Goodnight, Moon.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are they going to finally get all their documentation up to date? For a prototype application I tried using Qt and found the documentation to be conflicting, and where it wasn't conflicting, it was just generally lacking.
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
Motives of Stephen Elop, doesn't own any Nokia shares, but hundreds of thousand Microsoft shares? Where is the loyalty?
From http://www.tracked.com/person/stephen-elop/
Aug 31, 2010: SOLD 23,250 MSFT shares [SEC Filing]
Jan 21, 2010: SOLD 8,434 MSFT shares [SEC Filing]
Sep 25, 2009: BOUGHT 136,308 MSFT shares [SEC Filing]
Sep 25, 2009: SOLD 12,422 MSFT shares [SEC Filing]
Aug 31, 2009: SOLD 11,614 MSFT shares [SEC Filing]
Sep 26, 2008: BOUGHT 51,301 MSFT shares [SEC Filing]
Sep 26, 2008: SOLD 4,675 MSFT shares [SEC Filing]
Aug 31, 2008: SOLD 6,939 MSFT shares [SEC Filing]
Aug 29, 2008: BOUGHT 76,141 MSFT shares [SEC Filing]
Jan 22, 2008: BOUGHT 62,520 MSFT shares [SEC Filing]
Nov 24, 2006: SOLD 1,315 ADBE shares [SEC Filing]
Oct 24, 2006: SOLD 1,315 ADBE shares [SEC Filing]
Oct 16, 2006: BOUGHT 100,000 ADBE shares [SEC Filing]
Oct 16, 2006: SOLD 100,000 ADBE shares [SEC Filing]
Oct 13, 2006: BOUGHT 116,124 ADBE shares [SEC Filing]
and microsoft-beware-stephen-elop-is-a-flight-risk
When the Q&A starts you see this:
Q: Anonymous Coward February 12, 2011 at 1:29 pm
Thanks. Please answer one more question as soon as you are able to: Will Qt be ported to Windows Phone? Iâ(TM)d assume it would be technically possible, but would you be allowed to do that business-wise â¦?
A: Aron (Nokia) February 12, 2011 at 1:38 pm
Qt will not be ported to Windows Phone 7. One of the key benefits of joining an established ecosystem is that there is an established toolchain that everyone uses. All Windows Phone apps will run on all WP7 devices. Adding Qt to the mix would only cause fragmentation.
Unfortunate from a Qt perspective but wise from a developer ecosystem perspective.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Dude, your OWN LINK states that Firefox are the people who are not going to craft Firefox for the iPhone.
Now that Apple has relaxed the stance on interpreters, it could be the case that Apple would allow it. Although if they will, we should see some other browser before too long, like Opera...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Stephen Elop kept using the word "disruption", I'm don't think even he even knows exactly what he means by that...
the whole thing is submitted to ECMA and ISO for standardization
What, like OOXML? Do you reckon they would have to buy votes again or is the ISO process now sufficiently damaged to just push it through? I'm not even talking about ECMA, that's just rubber stamp based marketing.
Insert
I don't see the danger of them discontinuing Qt. I do however see the danger of discontinuing Linux support, making it Windows only, and possibly changing the license to something Microsoft likes more.
Fortunately Qt, being open source, can be forked, but that's only the second best alternative.
That's a more serious threat. Even if the OS should get forked, it's unlikely that any phone producer would use it if it's not backed by a major corporation.
Same here.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
1. Microsoft Fat Cat Exec leaves for heading Nokia.
2. Nokia ditches internal Linux development and saves MSs limping phone OS.
3. Profit!
How could that be a surprise?
It's people like you that make real Linux and open source people look bad.
Qt is free software. How can Nokia prevent ports to platforms such as Windows Phone 7? They can refuse to make it part of an official Nokia-backed Qt release, but they cannot prevent the port from happening.
On the other hand, there don't seem to be many external contributions to Qt, so such ports seem rather unlikely.
Actually, no; Opera Mini just tells a rendering proxy at Opera's servers to render a page for it, and the proxy renders the page and sends the data (and all the interactive regions and such) back to Opera Mini, which presents it. This is necessary because Apple doesn't allow 'language interpreters' to be in applications in the App Store (last I checked, anyway). The way Opera does it is complete crap, actually, in my opinion, but they did manage to use it to beat the system.
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.
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.
So Nokia have a cross-platform framework which allows their devs to program an app once to work on all their smartphones.
Except the new one.
So this can only mean either they only plan to have one smartphone OS, the new one which already has an app framework. Therefore no need to support the old one. Bad news for Nokia employees in the Symbian and Maemo divisions, plus all their app developers and fans.
Or it means that Microsoft can now dictate to Nokia that they don't want Qt apps running on their phones, since they want their app devs using existing MS tools. This means Microsoft have effectively bought Nokia for free. Bad news for Nokia shareholders.
microsoft. there is a record of this recurring in the past 3 decades, yet, corporations and boards keep making that mistake over and over. one wonders why ...
Read radical news here
The only possible scenario for QT under Microsoft's control
Qt is not under Microsoft's control. Nokia is not under Microsoft's control to begin with.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Let's imagine a bunch of upset Qt devs get together and form a company to develop Qt outside Nokia.
What's their business plan?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Fortunately, Qt isn't needed for a modern Linux desktop. In fact, I'd say the majority of Linux desktop users don't ever even install it. If Nokia's downfall were the catalyst for unifying Linux under a single UI, all the better. However, frankly, I don't see anything happening to Qt: it's open source and it will survive with or without Nokia.
Just because Nokia took their failing OS and open sourced it doesn't mean anybody gives a damn. The sooner Symbian goes away, the better, open source or not.
I'd like to see MeeGo succeed, but so far, it's little more than vaporware. MeeGo only had/has potential value: if it catches on, then it helps Linux. If MeeGo never materializes, nothing of value will be lost.
Inconceivable.
Google Voice still isn't on iPhone. Apple's criteria aren't logic and analogy, they are ideology.
Opera and Skype make proprietary, closed-source products with iffy cross-platform support, so they are in. Google and Mozilla make open source apps that work well across many platforms, so Apple hates them and they don't get approved.
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.
Perhaps using C++/CIL? It certainly needs quite a bit porting. (And Qt is not tied to OpenGL.)
So Nokia could say, "we will not commit resources to a WP7 port, but will happily include a community-provided one", with full knowledge that it is quite unlikely to happen, ever. Sends a much better message to the community.
It would be kinda tricky to port a C++ framework to the platform for which there is no C++ compiler (and no theoretical possibility to even write one with any decent performance of generated code).
I am a nerd.
I am a nerd who watch the stock market closely.
After the announcement of Nokia jumping into the sack with Microsoft, this is what happened ---> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/elop-gambles-nokias-future-on-microsoft-partnership/articleshow/7486397.cms " .... with Nokia's stock closing down a staggering 14.22 percent at 7.00 euros
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Google Voice still isn't on iPhone.
Then what's this?
Uh... "for future disruption"? What does that mean?
My guess is he meant "distribution," but seeing how he keeps using that same word it's anyone's guess.
Fortunately Qt, being open source, can be forked, but that's only the second best alternative.
No, it's the best alternative. That way the development ends up being needs driven instead of agenda driven.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
There is only one reason for which WP7 can gain money to Nokia, that is if they can axe the symbian and meego division and reduce costs (which in the execs twisted perception usually equates to gaining money). I don't care what fancy words they put on this: Qt will be canceled, Symbian and MeeGo will die. And they will have to do it quickly if they don't want their stocks down another 20%.
Wow, this days we are getting used to people lying to us in an obvious ways and put an straight face over it as if we were really stupid, it reminds me to people in the financial sector. They believe that if they are confident in their statements people will follow. And they do, short term, but when people discover the truth, people feel betrayed.
The best thing they can do is tell the truth: "We are choosing the MS way, if you are a symbian developer, go away, we don't want you, we want developers that don't know-like how to manage memory their selves, that don't know-like how to make their own libraries. We want people who is proficient on MS technologies and don't like reinventing wheels so code is fast and MS-Nokia remains in control. Native code writers go to hell, you will be obsoleted or outsourced."
They should sell QT to someone that cares. It is not good for a company to not have a clear vision, trying to do one thing and the opposite. This is like sailing from UK to New York, then when you are in the middle of the Atlantic change course for Spain and when you are near Spain you change again to New York...
KDE Qt foundation people should fork the project.They will eventually.
This is why you can't port Qt to .NET/Silverlight. This is not even pointing out the marshalling issues.
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.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I wonder what will happen to other open source projects that are mainly funded my Nokia. One example that comes to mind is (meta) tracker. AFAIK, most of its development is sponsored by Nokia as part of their Meego platform. and considering Microsoft's relation with OSS, I won't be surprised if Meego was the first to be axed.
I think he means disruption as in disruptive technologies i.e. technologies that make present tech redundant. So the iPhone was a disruptive technology in that it changed the market for mobile smart phones.
I think that the statement is meant to imply that Meego was being kept so that they can produce a product in the future that was disruptive to the competition in the mobile market
Whether that is a genuine possibility or a carrot to retain staff is open to speculation
Eh, the N900 is Linux on a phone. You don't buy Linux enabled hardware because the hardware manufacturer is going to give it great support (when has that ever happened?). You buy it because when the hardware manufacturer quits supporting you, you're still running Linux and you have support and source elsewhere.
I'm certainly happy with my N900, there simply aren't any devices even close without a lot of serious hacking. If anything, this makes me think about getting another one as a spare.
If Nokia releases a Meego phone I might buy that; again, Linux devices don't depend on the manufacturer as much as others do. But I'm hardly about to buy a WP, because when Windows Phone is discontinued (which might happen any day, considering Ballmers luck), there ain't gonna be no community support on that.
I think it just sums up the situation succinctly:
"Nokia got trapped by that win32.elop.trojan."
Has look and feel of a Zero Day exploit, and is creating that sort of confusion as well.
One could easily say it's not Zero Day, but then all ZD's are developed quietly over time and simply 'sprung' on the unsuspecting and unprepared innocent victims one day. Pretty much what happened.
QT has merit, and if the merit is good enough, and I think it is, it will have a strong future... just probably not with Nokia. (and yes I am a GNU/OSS/FLOSS fan boy, just not a zealot about it).
Anyway much credit to "eMPee584" for such a fine summation (assuming he was not quoting some one else, without attribution).
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).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If Nokia had to sign up with MSFT, then the projects were already endangered - by fact of being owned by the company with failed long-term strategy.
In short-term, I do not think that something would change for the projects. But in the long-term one can expect Nokia's going to distantiate themselves from the projects by either being influenced by the MSFT or by virtue of having no money to support the involvement.
I care about OSS and I'd say the larger problem here is that (from your words) that Nokia still "owns" some pieces of the projects. But if that is true, then the problem was always there, simply waiting to be exposed.
P.S. In other news, Nokia hired ex-MSFT manager. Recall how well that went for SGI and Real.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Since then they have an idiot new executive that says the company that still sells more phones than anyone is in such deep trouble that it is "an oil platform on fire" and everything has to be changed.
That's code for firing anyone that gets in the way of bringing in as many friends into sinecures to feed their snouts at the trough and an excuse for any irrational near criminal behaviour. Expect no promises to be kept on anything and the company to decline for a while.
Nokia is probably big enough to survive this until the idiot is deposed and plenty of useful stuff will possibly continue to be done under the radar. I do feel sorry for the people I know that recently got brought into Nokia via Trolltech (Qt) when it looked like a positive move, and for the European Nokia people that have to withstand the sort of clueless American boss that does nothing but work for personal gain and need a lawyer on their shoulder to keep them out of jail. That's not being anti-american, most of you will have seen the type of boss that just goes wild and gets extremely unethical when they find out legal restrictions are different. Just more of them seem to be exported from the USA at the moment than elsewhere.
- MS. EULA agreement when installing qt
- kde4 will now come with regedit and Tweakui-95
- will ship with Norton antivirus
- all kde system services will now run as root
- system tray icons in Kde will mysteriosly multiply like drunken gerbils
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
It could be something kept in reserve in case WP gets canned when Ballmer gets canned.
But I suspect it's mostly just words to keep Intel from blowing a fuse and to keep the ship jumping to a managable rate.
Are these the first steps of the Ubuntu/Microsoft merge?
No. But first prospective Qt tech buyer.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
all slashdot icons got updated with the new design, why the hell you still use that old kde logo? those are the logo you should use http://www.kde.org/stuff/clipart.php
Trying to replace Symbian with Linux was an incredibly stupid idea.
Right, that's why everyone and their mom is doing this or something just like it.
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
So Symbian uses less resources but now we're using more powerful devices so this doesn't matter, and their POSIX model is incomplete unlike Android... I'm not seeing the strengths here. Linux is pretty great at multiprocessing, by the way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One of the key benefits of joining an established ecosystem
are we still talking about the Windows Phone system here? or Silverlight that MS decided wasn't as good as HTML5?
Besides, they can;t run Qt on Windows Phone, then developers would be able to code once and practically run their apps on all competing manufacturers OSs. Microsoft can't have that!
Isn't Qt becoming less and less relevant? I mean, everyone is using the web. More and more applications are moving to the web, even on PCs. And now the WAC is even using web standards to create a mobile "Apps" ecosystem. Why bother with Qt when you can crate apps faster, cheaper and easier with web tech?
Clever signature text goes here.
Qt's biggest advantage, next to a clean and consistent api, are it's cross platform abilities. Recently they merged QPA (formerly lighthouse) in the main develoment tree. This means that by reimplementing the QPA Classes on a given platform, that platform will run QT. There are already android and iOS build of the latest development tree in the wild. Basically this means that anything that can run a reasonably modern C++ compiler can be a target platform for QT.
Does anybody has a count of Qt's user base? (Google Earth, Photoshop, skype ). It's used on the server, on the desktop, embedded, mobile...
It's by far the fastest way to build something that runs on Mac,Linux and Win32 without a hassle.
Also, I've read the wildest assumptions of making Qt build solely on Winwhatever platform. Has anybody ever peeked at the Qt source... It will be a mammoth task to strip the cross platform capabilities.
Nokia Oyj announced that in connection with the need to reduce the operating costs as well as costs for research and development, it plans to reduce personnel as soon as possible.
2011-02-11
Hello Mark,
You have followed this thread, plenty of people are pessimistic about Qt's future.
Qt's future is you. Buy it, make smartphone developers happy and occasionally port the entire Gnome to it.
It won't make you poor.
Thanks a lot!
Nah, it will just go away completely.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In a few years we will have phones with WP7 and Linux dual-boot. The market of mobile devices is just like the PC market and worse: Full of politics, platforms, and redundant software. As a software developer I am appalled by the waste of developer time.
But as Steve Ballmer so eloquently says: "We are going to give customers exiting choices."
LOL
The only chance I see for Qt is a fork and a very quick community driven development of Qt for android.
You realize that software with graphical interfaces does not begin and end on smartphones, do you? And that Android is not the ultimate gift to all software developing humanity?
Um, I just wasted a few minutes of my time. I should not have bothered with someone clueless enough to consider "Qt for Android" seriously.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
My gut reaction is that the AC has nothing to do with MS and that he's simply trolling. It's an obvious button-push; suggest that your typical Slashdotters' dislike of MS is simply vapid, adolescent bandwagon jumping.
If he was really working for MS, I suspect he'd be a lot more sophisticated than that.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I'd really like to know whether not supporting Qt4 on WP7 is part of the agreement.
IANAL, so I really can't make heads or tails of the myriads of licensing agreements and don't know the detail of what is open sourced at this time and what isn't.
IIRC Nokia paid something like a $150 Million for Trolltech.
So I assume that they must still maintain control of licensing, didn't completely open source everything.
Something that prevents a simple Fork and ignore Nokia move??
I assume Nokia has some legal mumbo jumbo in the licensing to prevent them losing control after spending millions to buy QT.
I can sort of relate to it. I personally love FLOSS by heart but I really don't like the culture that I often find. Every time you bring up .NET or anything that comes from Microsoft then the argument is not that Microsoft is bad for this or that technical reason. It's Microsoft is bad because Bill Gates is a seal clubbing bastard and if you're being paid by Microsoft, you're going to burn in a very special level of hell.
FLOSS should win because the software is better, not because it's fun to bash Microsoft.
I bought an N900 too, and i did it not because was hoping that Nokia improves it after, but the community, and it delivered. Now is a better device than it was at the start, not just because of apps (that if well could had been far more, there are several quality ones), but also core features, like kernels with enabled overclocking that improved battery life a lot or libraries that enable apps to do nice tricks with the camera like taking HDR photos.
Regarding Nokia, i bought it to the old company. It delivered me a linux mobile computer with phone capabilities, with desktop flash that took other vendors 6 months or a year to match, with 32 gb of storage plus a great hw keyboard, that in the updates added little pearls like skype/gtalk video calls 3-6 months before any other device. Even a year and half of the original release it compares well against current smartphones.
I don't think i was wrong when I bought it, nor had lost it usefulness because the mole they hired as CEO. And there are room to improvements for the phone. The Community SSU improving things at the core, with a bit of luck the Alien Dalvik opening the door for a bunch of new apps, a possible near future PR that could bring Meego dual boot, or just dual booting Nitdroid on it.
I'm still surprised that nobody seems to have noticed the timeline: A Microsoft executive moves over to Nokia at the behest of investors who supposedly have stakes in both Microsoft and Nokia. Just five months later, the "ex"-Microsoft CEO announces they're effectively dumping Nokia's internal R&D to become a distribution organ for Microsoft, complete, apparently, with a prototype phone already in existence.
How long does it take to design and build a new prototype phone for an OS the company had never even touched before? I'm guessing this was the plan right from the moment Elop's takeover was arranged through Nokia's board. It definitely doesn't look like this is a hard decision that Elop thought over carefully for a long time...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
But Linux is very weak at power management. Symbian's real weakness is the UI and not the Kernel.
Linux as a mobile OS sucks... Until you put a good UI on it. I am not an expert on Symbian but I have done a lot of Linux work and it really needs help in power management. Yes cellphones now have more resources that a VAX11/780 but that doesn't mean that you have resources to throw away.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
To put it even more bluntly: "commodity" services and protocols are good things for customers; they promote competition and choice. Therefore, for Microsoft to win, the customer must lose.
Microsoft truly behaves as though it corporately believes that there's only a fixed pool of key ideas, most already discovered, which software designers must squabble over in zero-sum competition until the end of time. In that game, the only definition of `winning' is cornering enough goodies to guarantee you a monopoly lock.
assert one's viewpoint at the potential expense of another. It can be useful when achieving one's objectives outweighs one's concern for the relationship.
Here's the definition of accommodation:
surrender one's own needs and wishes to accommodate the other party.
Let's analyze the Nokia-Microsoft "deal". What has Microsoft gained?
As on old farmer once told me, a dog that chases two rabbits catches neither.
One that chases three might well run under a bus...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You need to switch to Gentoo. They break it every week!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...Microsoft is bad because Bill Gates is a seal clubbing bastard...
Stop that! You're going to give seal clubbing bastards a bad name. Just kidding.
I agree with your sentiment but it's not likely to change any time soon. Microsoft bashing was a recreational sport even before the web existed. A history of predatory business practices, abuse of monopoly power, vendor lock in, subversion of standards and generally evil behaviour tend to overshadow any good technology they do produce particularly in the eyes of the FLOSS community.
As a result the FLOSS community is mistrusting, I think rightfully so, of anything even remotely linked to Microsoft. Unfortunately after decades of mistrust it's more often to manifest as soapbox pontifications rather than reasoned statements.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
This move is just outright bizarre to me. Nokia is essentially throwing themselves under a bus.
Agreed. The only thing that makes sense to me is if Microsoft made them an offer they couldn't refuse:
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/02/sizing-up-field.html
I suspect the remnants of the MeeGo path will be out by year's end
If that were true though they wouldn't say (as they said in this post) that the MeeGo phone is coming out at the end of the year!
I can see Symbian taking on a legacy role but with MeeGo still in the picture you have no clear vision of a future or why you should support them at all. If Nokia does drop MeeGo later after this message saying MeeGo will proceed, then Nokia looks either evil or idiotic. Either way I'd want nothing to do with them.
I also thought WP7 had some great potential but without Nokia 100% behind it I do not think it can gain the traction it needs against Android or the iPhone. Basically by the end of the year WP7 will be complete from a competitive standpoint, but they'll have no-one to truly spotlight that.
I just can't see any way Nokia didn't get screwed now if they are not going to work the opportunity given.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Qt IS tied to OpenGL. In fact, the design is centered around OpenGL ES and it's quoted many times in their docs and source.
There's only THREE graphics systems, default (which is basically raster), raster (cpu-based) and OpenGL (1.x and 2.0). Widget system is either Qt custom, or Native. There's nothing in between, and they've gotten rid of the legacy rest.
I've before dived into the 4.7 and 4.8 (HEAD) source and written a custom DirectDraw backend for WinMob 6.5 because there was no existing support for it. I've been very intimate with how the graphics system works.
Of course the DD backend was pointless because it didn't solve the fact that Qt's footprint swallows 12-15MB of virtual (out of the precious little ~24MB for a WM process). Nor did it solve Qt's full-of-memory-fat cpu-based handing of graphics buffers, so I abandoned the project entirely.
Qt is very tied to OpenGL because it's the ONLY graphics API that consistently exists on the majority of the platforms out there and what it's been ported to (Windows, Mac, embedded, Symbian, WinMob, etc).
Everything that has been developed since Nokia took over has been worthless to the desktop, and in some ways counterproductive. And I don't get the whole Qt Quick thing either. As far as I'm concerned, 4.6.3 was the final version of Qt.
This is so true, it's not even fucking funny. Maemo is *true* Linux in your pocket - none of this "port it to Java and package it *again*" bullshit. You could install stuff from Debian ARM repos outright; at worst you had to redesign the UI and recompile. Then Nokia decided to piss all over that and throw in their lot with a distro that didn't even *have* an ARM port, and still relied on RPMs for package management. Fuck.
Nathan's blog
Nokia had no dick and balls to ditch Symbian in due time. Now it has finally found the balls to do so
You must be reading some other article, because the article Slashdot linked to said no such thing - it fact it looked very much like Symbian would keep chugging along!
I also was excited, because I thought Nokia had woken up. Instead with Microsoft they have just decided to divide attention further it seems instead of choosing a direction and sticking with it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would love to hear all the reasons this is such a bad thing.
I used WP7 for the first time last weekend. It was very clunky, non-intuitive and buggy. To enter text in the field, you have to tap another button on the screen, rather than tapping on the field. It refused to load the second site I went to. The facebook app posted a message on my wall, without telling me or asking for my consent, that I had installed and was now using WP7, which caused all kinds of responses, usually along the lines of "say it isn't so".
I tried an IPhone a few months ago. It worked intuitively without instructions and did what I expected it to do. It didn't send or post any messages in my name. I hear similar comments about Android.
The bottom line is that you couldn't give away WP7. The only reason people would use it is because they are MS fans or think that since it's MS then it must be at least ok.
Many people seem incapable of investigating connections and learning that Elop is the 8th LARGEST MS stockholder, although he claims his shares aren't worth that much and he's selling them as fast as the law allows.
It is obvious he is not conflicted in his interests since, as a major stockholder, it is in his own interest to keep MICROSOFT as profitable as he can. A former Microsoft executive, he's done to Nokia what he did to Macromedia as its CEO. Macromedia WAS a competitor to SilverLight but it is now dead. Symbian, running on 200 million Nokia phones (4 times Apple's iPhone market), is now DEAD in 1st world countries! Symbian will only be onn phones in non-1st world countries and for another 150 million sales or so, then it is DEAD world-wide. Qt's mobile phone foot print was only on the Nokia phone, now it is DEAD on that platform, and WP7 lives. The pattern is too consistent to be accidental. It's worse. Elop has it in his power to kill all future proprietary Qt apps on the Windows platform.
Elop cannot hurt the GPL version of Qt, but his true motives for Qt will be revealed when we learn what his plans are for the commercial Qt license. IF he does NOT allow Nokia to continue to sell commercial Qt licenses (dragging his feet, making promises which put off Qt plans, etc...) we'll know what his true motives for accepting the Nokia CEO position were -- to kill Qt's cross platform capability for proprietary applications (sans source) on the Windows platform. Qt, "write once, run anywhere", IS exploding on the Windows platform. It makes a LOT of economic sense to use Qt to write a proprietary app whose source code can be compiled on THREE platforms with little or no change. One very sophisticated tool chain, three target platforms. Ballmer knows that. Elop knows that. The WORLD has now learned that. That is what scares Ballmer, Microsoft, and .... Elop?
They also know that the QtFree Foundation Agreement, signed by Nokia in 2009, allows ALL of Qt to go BSD or fully GPL if Nokia (Elop) allows a gap of more than one year between the free and proprietary version, or if Qt development is not *significant* for a year. Elop isn't supposed to nickle and dime Qt development. But, I predict that he will. He will allow the commercial version to stagnate, and by succession the GPL version, using what ever excuse he needs to use. Because they have stagnated they are not "up to Nokia's high standards" and commercial Qt license sales will be suspended until WP7 activities moderate and allow "resumption" of Qt development. Elop can waste another few months "negotiating" with the QtFree foundation and, more importantly for Microsoft, no NEW commercial Qt licenses will be available during that time. Existing proprietary Qt projects will be impeded. Letting Qt go BSD would be a problem, though, because it opens Qt to the Windows ecosystem again, this time WITHOUT a license! Elop & Microsoft can't allow that to happen. So, they'll add just enough development to Qt to make it *significant*, even if it really isn't (is changing a few files and the version number significant? Whose lawyer will fight that?) which gives them another year. Qt is now, really, two years behind. That's 2/3rds of a computer generation! If they can stretch this ploy out another year Qt becomes a computer generation behind other tools. App developers look to other tools. Elop has freed the Windows ecosystem of proprietary Qt apps, creating more opportunities for Microsoft to step back in and fill the vacuum left by Qt's departure.
IMO killing commercial Qt is what his move to Nokia was all about. Nokia's Symbian smartphone market share was twice Android's and four times iPhone's, and the cure to stopping the 22% market share decline over the last year is to shed 19% market share, fire most of your developers, abandon your "disruptive" technologies, and re
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
It means that they know that WP7 has only a 3% market share and they are hedging their bets.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Nokia's problem is they were in a different phase to the other big players. From what I've heard, the N900 was never intended to compete directly with the iPhone, etc. - it was supposed to be used for research to see how people interacted with a phone that that had actual computing capabilities. If you look at its predecessors, you can see how it was never marketed strongly - it was a niche product to gauge the demand. Had they launched a series of smartphones at a range of price points that ran it, they would probably have done rather well. Instead, they formed a partnership with Intel, who also had their own similar OS called Moblin. As a compromise, they decided to merge both into MeeGo. This meant that there was now 2 obsolete OSs (Maemo & MeeGo) and 1 new, incomplete OS (MeeGo). Which means they still don't have anything to use with a smartphones (having relegated Symbian to the feature phones) and therefore can't meaningfully compete with the Android/iPhone. Consequently, they had to turn to MS. tldr; Nokia threw away Maemo and then needed an OS so they went with Windows.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Disclaimer: I'm an N900 owner.
I guess one problem I see is that Nokia never really had the guts to put a ton of gusto behind Maemo. The N900 runs Maemo 5, and while it has some impressive features, it still messes up really basic stuff, even as of PR 1.3:
And yet, since 2007 (well after Nokia started the tablet series in 2005), Apple has shipped 4 major versions of its iOS platform, all of them production worthy. Sure, the initial releases might've got light on the features (no MMS, no cut-and-paste, etc.), but they had something worthy of shipping. Why? Because they had both the weight and resources of the company behind it, as well as the focusing pressure of having to ship a viable product.
Nokia's Maemo research project feels like it never had the pressure to be truly real. They've been at it for 6 years, and it still has basic UI problems. The phone does some amazing stuff. I'm duly impressed. It needs some serious attention to the basic spit and polish though. Some of the N900's shortcomings have been addressed with 3rd party packages. Those help, but it's still rather clunky. (fMMS sucks compared to having MMS ability built right into the messenger, for example. And Faster Application Manager is a must for everyone.)
Nokia had a chance to get out in front of everyone years ago and totally squandered it. Symbian had a short term advantage in resource usage and battery management. By today's standards, though, the S60 UI sucks. They were content with a culture of incrementalism and got blindsided by radical changes. If Nokia had made a strategic decision in 2005 to transition their Symbian efforts to life support and put the company's full attention on addressing Maemo's resource-management shortcomings and then building a modern, kick ass UI on that so that they could transition from Symbian to Linux after a couple years, then they could have totally blunted the iPhone's popularity.
Even if they had waited until the iPhone's debut to adopt such a strategy, treating iPhone as a wake-up call, they still could have blunted the success of Android by offering a compelling alternative. Of course, Android does have the multivendor angle, so Nokia would have had to offer the base OS to multiple vendors (just as multiple vendors had/have Symbian phones) to head off Android.
Program Intellivision!
Thanks for the info. Frankly I fear that WP7+Nokia is going to be a disaster. I would love to see a $199 Nokia MeeGo phone on Sprint in the US. Right now I use an HTC Evo 4G which I do really like but Nokia traditonaly builds good phones IE good call quality and has always been very interesting. I was tempted by the E71 but in the US it was on AT&T and I didn't want to jump on AT&T.
I think that is part of the problem in the US. Nokia doesn't want to deal with CDMA so it is locked out of the number one and number three carrier in the US. AT&T was all about the iPhone and TMobile is all about Android.
You can not even buy many low end Nokia phones through US carriers. Add in the US carriers really don't offer you any break for not having a subsidized phone and you can see the problem.
But I fear that WP7 will be a case of Nokia jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.