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Nokia Gives Some Hints On the Future of Qt

Posted by timothy on from the will-remain-two-letters dept.

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.

6 of 329 comments (clear)

  1. I have an idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Fool me once by Compaqt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Fool me once by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. Re:Why is this a bad thing? by Morty · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Motives of Stephen Elop? by G3ckoG33k · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  5. Re:Erm... What exactly are they saying about MeeGo by SwedishPenguin · · Score: 5, Funny

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