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?

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

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: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: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: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: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.