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

I have an idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE's Qt developers should split off and form a separate company -- named Trolltech -- and continue work on a forked Qt.

Intel was surprised as hell

[ryzvonusef]

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?

Re:Intel was surprised as hell

[ryzvonusef]

The key word is "abandon". Can we legally compel Nokia to give up Qt just because it's not giving *sufficient* care?

I was looking around the net, and I found this interesting tidbit:

http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

The Foundation has a license agreement with Nokia. This agreement ensures that the Qt will continue to be available under both the LGPL 2.1 and the GPL 3. Should Nokia discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under these licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreement stays valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy.

In case MS buys Nokia, or the company goes bankrupt, then there is a choice, but just mere neglect might not cut the cheese.

Also, what does "discontinue development" imply? If Nokia keeps toting out at least one update per year, would that count?

I am not an expert at legalese, but reading that paragraph tell me that there does exist some sort of "fork now!" option. Whether that will be good enough is another question.

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:Why is this a bad thing?

[Morty]

I would love to hear all the reasons this is such a bad thing.

Why Nokia getting into bed with MSFT is bad:

1. Nokia owns one of the major Linux desktop components, qt. This potentially endangers that component, by removing some of Nokia's incentive to continue qt development.
2. Nokia owns one of the major open-source phone OSs, Symbian. This potentially endangers that OS.
3. Nokia is involved in another open-source, Linux-based phone OS, MeeGo. This potentially endangers that OS, too.

In a single stroke, three high-profile open-source components are potentially endangered. If you care about open-source, this is a bad thing.

Erm... What exactly are they saying about MeeGo?

[Mr Z]

- Nokia also announced it will ship its first MeeGo-related device in 2011, which will rely on the Qt ecosystem – and then will continue with MeeGo as an open source project for future disruption.

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?

Motives of Stephen Elop?

[G3ckoG33k]

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

Re:Motives of Stephen Elop?

[Rithiur]

According to Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, Elop wasn't allowed to trade the shares. Nokia informed the paper that after Elop started planning the co-operation with Microsoft, trading away the Microsoft stock and buying Nokia stock instead would have been considered illegal due to insider information.

A poor translation of the article is as follows:

On Saturday, Nokia informed Helsingin Sanomat that the CEO of Nokia, Stephen Elop, doesn't own any Nokia shares yet due to stock market regulations. The same reason has prevented Elop from selling his remaining Microsoft shares.

Stock market regulations prevent company insiders from using unreleased insider information in their trades. According to Nokia's interpretation, the changes in strategy that Elop planned were considered insider information until last Friday.

When Elop started his work on 21st of September, he also started to plan the new strategy. Nokia informed the because of this, Elop hasn't been able to buy shares.

According to Nokia, Elop had to stop selling his Microsoft shares last year for the same reason. According to Nokia's information, Elop was able to sell 60 percent of his Microsoft shares which means he still has 40 percent left to sell.

Elop stopped selling his Microsoft shares when significant co-operation with Microsoft was brought into the plans.

Nokia doesn't publish the date when that happened, but according to information from Nasdaq, Elop sold 23 000 Microsoft shared on the last day of previous August.

He still has 261 000 Microsoft shares.

Nope, scroll down, not going to be ported to WP7

[SuperKendall]

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.

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

[SwedishPenguin]

Stephen Elop kept using the word "disruption", I'm don't think even he even knows exactly what he means by that...

Re:The Insane Triad

[Microlith]

Now I see Nokia is traveling down all three paths. What?

They are not. All non-Microsoft paths will end, I suspect the remnants of the MeeGo path will be out by year's end, if not earlier. Symbian will have a longer tail due to its installed base and pipeline.

They will both charge on down the WP7 path, pushing closed, locked down systems with Microsoft firmly in control.

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.

Take a deep breath

[21mhz]

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.

Re:Take a deep breath

[GNious]

yet - http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/12/nokia-usa-president-is-out-replaced-by-microsoft-vet-chris-webe/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weblogsinc%2Fengadget+(Engadget)

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

[NuShrike]

This is why you can't port Qt to .NET/Silverlight. This is not even pointing out the marshalling issues.

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:I bought an N900

[Znork]

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.

Zero Day win32.elop.trojan

[NewToNix]

I wish I could take credit for this, but it's from a comment by "eMPee584" over on the http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/12/nokia-new-strategic-direction-what-is-the-future-for-qt/ (Blog link from the summary).

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).

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).