Changes at Nokia
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Well, Meltemi seems to be gone ...
bq. "It is official – the dream of a great mobile product in Nokia Ulm is over."
"Naren Karattup":https://twitter.com/nkaratt/status/213202227379179520
Qt Software, Head of Global Consultancy at Nokia... as well as Qt for the next billion.
bq. Next billion strategy is based on Java. Period!
"Eero Penttinen":https://twitter.com/eeropenttinen/status/213209218164076544
Domain Lead, Qt for MeeGo R&D at Nokia -
This is very, very bad news indeed. :(
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Oh, I think we all have nice and bright thoughts about where Qt could go, who should do what, and who should buy whom. The problem is, we are not making those decisions...
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[quote author="deion" date="1339684279"]As a Qt dev this would be a dream come true.
[/quote]Very true. Maybe we should crowd-ask Elop to sell it wisely (if he intends to sell it at all - let us remember that Qt was not mentioned in the announcement).
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And there we have our answer for Qt as well.
bq. "We’re fans of Qt, and we’ll continue to support it in the near term, but are being open about looking for opportunities which may be best for this developer framework."
"Richard Kerris":http://allthingsd.com/20120614/nokia-to-end-meltemi-effort-for-low-end-smartphones/
Global Head of Developer Relations, VP bei Nokia -
bq. "Please give us some time to figure out ourselves what is going on. We have the Qt Contributors Summit next week and a Qt 5 release ongoing. There is plenty of work to do. [...] And now, if you don't mind, I'll keep workin on my Qt CS and Qt 5 launch tasks. :)"
"Quim Gil":http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/2012-June/002465.html
Qt Project Community Manager -
[quote author="veeraps" date="1339748178"]I guess if Nokia couldn't promote Qt, no one else would buy, Samsung already have their own OS and they are already into Android, RIM is also having their own!!!
What is gonna happen to Qt!! [/quote]
Qt is a development platform and can be made to run on any OS. Qt is an important part of RIM's new BB10 platform. There is also a port going on for Android. Since Qt is opensource, I guess anybody can use it on top of their OS platform just like RIM did. Samsung may use it for Tizen. Don't know how Nokia sees this, but from Kerris' comments, they don't seem to have any problem.
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Qt doesn't need to be /bought/ in order to continue to live. It is now a free software project like any other. And it existed a long time before Nokia acquired Trolltech.
While Nokia is the major (~80% of commits) contributor to Qt (that is, ex-Trolltech people), they are not the only one.
I'd really like to see some company like KDAB (the second contributor) or a new company (possibly called Trolltech :) ) to emerge as the new guardian and de-facto support provider.
The important thing is that there is a market for Qt and that there still are parties interested in it. It remains to be seen whether the market for Qt is big enough to keep the pace of development it currently has.
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What I find amazing is Intel is surprisingly non-enthusiastic when it comes to software. They have long been in a position of being able to deliver complete hardware platforms, or a complete solution on hardware level, and even thou they have all the resources a company could ask for, then never went the extra step to create a complete in-house platform solution, both hardware and software. All they have is their compiler, some other development tools, some drivers and that's pretty much it.
In another thread I pointed our Samsung as a company that can be interested in purchasing Qt. Samsung produce a complete hardware platform too, have a nice market share in mobile devices and even thou so far they rely on Android, they also offer their own software enhancements. Currently, Android is the only obstacle Samsung has to completely PWN Apple, and purchasing Qt can get them much closer to the goal of having their own OS with a high performance, native framework.
What is even better, since they already have many Android devices on the market, they may very well officially support Qt on Android, cuz I doubt they will just leave behind their current user base like some other * cough * companies, switching to a new OS...
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Forget about Samsung, they already have a full access to the Enlightenment Foundation Library, a free C fast, ligth and highly themable tooklit designed by the Enlightenment project for embedded and ressource constrained hardware from the ground. This library already include widget build on top of a scene graph (Evas) with a theme engine getting the layout from file description (Edje), that work perfectly with OpenGL, OpenGL ES and even with just software.
And they are already using it in Tizen for all the native UI application. That's why Samsung never needed Qt in Tizen, because they have something that already fit the embedded world much better than Qt does.
Now, it's time for the Qt project to prove that it is a really open source project. That it doesn't need anymore the umbrella of one big company and get contribution from much more wide range of company. Maybe that's a good thing as it will mean that one company will not decide for its futur, and make it as resistant as the Linux kernel is.
