Nokia Sells Qt 193
Google85 writes "Now that Nokia has shifted to a Windows Phone-centric smartphone strategy, it's only natural for the company to divest itself of responsibility with regard to the Qt framework. It has been announced Digia will acquire the Qt commercial licensing and services business from Nokia, including the transfer of some 3,500 desktop and embedded customers actively using Qt today."
But what does it mean for development? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the commercial licensing side of Qt, *NOT* Qt. The major thing that will matter to the open source community is whether Qt will still be developed as a robust cross platform toolkit, not so much what happens to the commercial licensing business. Even Qt's future on phones doesn't concern me too much - the smart phone industry moving towards "app store" models and locked down platforms is a much bigger concern. (I'm just waiting for Apple to announce they're moving to an App Store model for all their desktop machines...)
Where Qt really shines is as a toolkit for graphical applications on the desktop. THAT's what ultimately concerns me - will the developers who have made Qt such an outstanding cross platform graphical toolkit will be allowed to continue their work as a paid, full time job? Never mind the phones, KDE and a vast array of non-KDE desktop applications that are important parts of the open source ecosystem rely on Qt (especially those that have to deploy on Windows). Would the commercial Linux vendors step in to keep the Qt devs programming, much as they have hired Linux kernel folk in the past? Libreoffice indicates they will act to protect key elements of open source, so fingers crossed. A statement along those lines would be reassuring, if they are in fact able and willing to fall back to that solution if necessary.
Re:So much for plan B... (Score:3, Interesting)
'Kinda risky' is putting it mildly. Watching Nokia is like watching an alcoholic drinking themselves to death. It's tragic.
I doubt it's death, so much as transformation. Before the announcement Nokia was an innovator producing distinct hardware & software. After the announcement they become one of Microsoft's bitches pumping out handsets which are substantially similar to the likes coming out from LG / Samsung / HTC. Perhaps it's cheaper to do, but at the end of the day Nokia's brand will be severely tarnished.
It's also worth noting that Nokia is the only manufacturer to bet the farm on a single phone OS vendor. LG, Samsung and HTC all have their fingers in many pies (e.g. WP7, Android, Bada, Brew). It seems like a good way to hedge if the WP7 ship sinks which is entirely possible.
It's death of Nokia as a respected brand, sooner or later it will be death of Nokia entirely.
I'll argue that Nokia was already on it's death bed (as a respected brand), they were completely missing in the smart phone market, which is the market you need to be in if you want to be a respected cell phone manufacturer brand. Yes, they were working on neat products, but it seemed that they were quite a bit away from shipping (and being new, they carried a lot of risk as well).
I think that Nokia was forced to going third party, where the choices are Android and WP7. think going with WP7 was a good idea. It's a shipped product that looks pretty slick and is well reviewed. Yes, it's not exclusive to Nokia, but it's not too popular compared to Android, so I think it will still give the Nokia phones a more exclusive feel as when compared to Android. That, and they got a ton of cash for choosing WP7, which they will hopefully use to develop neat hardware.
Re:So much for plan B... (Score:4, Interesting)
QT's customers are developers who licence QT commercial edition, not end users. This includes companies such as Opera and Google who's products are used by millions of people.
But I'm sure you knew that already.
Re:So much for plan B... (Score:4, Interesting)
WTF!
The good bit of Symbian - uses orders of magnitude less resources that the competition.
The bad bit - the UI from hell.
And you suggest putting a Symbian UI on Android?
Like I said, WTF.
(Check out SBP mobile shell for Symbian to see what could have been done if Nokia weren't totally fucked up. Look at it running on a low-end piece of junk like the 5320 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZtKTOTus7s [youtube.com] ).
Re:So much for plan B... (Score:4, Interesting)
After the announcement they become one of Microsoft's bitches pumping out handsets which are substantially similar to the likes coming out from LG / Samsung / HTC.
Not quite. There's no "dedicated" WP7 vendor so far - all of the companies you've listed mostly do Android phones (Samsung is also pushing its Bada on low-cost phones); WP is the odd one in their lineup. Nokia, meanwhile, could become the maker of WP phones - much like HTC did back in the day when they rode the WinMo wave. The trick is in knowing when to jump off.
search terms = microsoft digia (Score:5, Interesting)
Watch Qt licensing and support fees to skyrocket to drive Qt out of the market. Nokia won't be implicated but that is probably the plan. Anything cross platform has _always_ been a threat to Microsoft and they have done everything legal and many time illegal to destroy these. Qt is a threat to Microsoft and destroying Qt also helps them hurt companies like Google and Adobe who base many of their tools and products on Qt. IMO
I figured this would happen but hoped it wouldn't. it sucks.
LoB
Re:So much for plan B... (Score:0, Interesting)
Umm, if Android was chosen, won't Nokia be fighting for the 'scraps' with Motorola, HTC, Samsung, Sony, etc. as you put it?
Nope. With the engineering talent Nokia had, they could have downloaded Android and done anything they wanted with it. Instead of being just another purveyor of virtually identical Windows Phone 7 handsets, they could have actually differentiated themselves with Android. At the least if they were a me-too Android peddler they could have been a part of the huge and fastest growing mobile ecosystem in existence instead of just a piece of the pathetically small portion held by WP7. WP7 is a joke. They can't even get the update updater right. And now it's looking like multi-tasking is going to have to wait until 2012. Hell, it'll be the end of the world before WP7 is even a modern operating system.
Atleast MS was offering them a better deal
Better deal for who? Upper management? Sounds like business as usual. Sacrifice the future of the company and shareholder value so a few at the top can buy another yacht and pad that golden parachute. Of course, WP7 was a foregone conclusion anyway seeing as they have an MS stooge at the helm. You ought to know a little something about that...