Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

my opinion is based on 2 points:

1) from nokia press release: "The acquisition of Trolltech will enable Nokia to accelerate its cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications" ... "With Trolltech, Nokia and third party developers will be able to develop applications that work in the Internet, across Nokia's device portfolio and on PCs"

so nokia wants to spread qt everywhere, why would they left tablets behind?

2) why would they support 2 different toolkits on one small device, that is memory (and cpu) restricted. further more, as i see it, nokia prefers to control the design from hw to sw. they could not do it with gtk, they could do it with qt.

what's for sure, transition of maemo to qt would be painful for 3rd party apps, maybe impossible. just look at problems switching from os2007 to os2008, that should be relatively straightforward.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Some healthy speculation here, but I'm sure this thing needs to jell a bit before we get a decent understanding of the full impact to current projects. Heck, it hasn't been approved by the required 90% or more of the stockholders yet (just around 65% at last count).

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Here it is the Nokia full press event, with Webcast link (thanks to Alberto from the maemo-users mailing list)

http://www.nokia.com/A4813580

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

This means, we get a N810/KDE4 Edition? ;)

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Ok, according to Kai Oistamo, EVP - Devices: "Maemo will continue to be based in GNOME."

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

So looks like they'll improve Maemo with the help of Trolltech.. I still think about QTopia on top of Maemo, S40 and S60.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Uhh, NO. Sorry you are way, way off.

QT has always been (in a way) free OSS (FLOSS). You are probably thinking of the Windows port. Trolltech released Qt/Windows 4 under the GPL in June 2005, which isn't exactly recently. . .

The FLOSS version of QT has always been free, but Trolltech charges for the version used to make closed-source software, and used to charge for the open source development kit a long long time ago. Due to the dispute over that the Gnome project was formed (it existed sort of before that anyway. . .), and the KDE Free Qt foundation was formed in Since then the FLOSS version of Qt has been under a BSD-style license.

The Mac version has been FLOSS since 2003.

Disclaimer: The statement below is a joke
The tablet version has been closed source since Nokia bought Trolltech :eek: watch out penguinbait!!!

OK, seriously now, the purchase of Trolltech could be a good or bad development. Like FREE I'm somewhat hesitant to give my blessings to all of this just yet. . .

On one hand it will give Nokia more experienced Linux developers. On the other hand Nokia had always been a proponent of closed-source software until Maemo came along (see Symbian). Hopefully this development means they are somewhat changing their ways as they see the advantages of FLOSS. IF they leave Trolltech as an independent company I see no real problems. On the other hand if they fully integrate it into the OSSO division that would be a real tragedy, I believe. A better thing would be to integrate the OSSO division into Trolltech and keep it separate.

None of this should have too much of an effect on FLOSS stuff since the version used is already FLOSS and can be developed independently if need be. Hopefully Nokia will see the tremendous advantages of keeping the KDE team on board and working on that, and not phone-based stuff. It could prove to be a major advantage if Nokia allocates a bit more money to Trolltech for KDE R&D. That would be awesome and really help GNU/Linux move forward!

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

That's what I fear... for other qt customers and probably even for the community. We are here talking about commercial qt (maybe qtopia?) which is not gpled.
Not sure about the implications of this news..

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Most but not all.
At my day job, my last project was in Python, using Qt via the PyQt bindings.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

I think it's obvious that Nokia's after QT as a possible replacement for S60, possibly on Symbian as well as Linux.

However, Intel and Canonical are both using Hildon for MIDs and Ubuntu Mobile. I don't see Nokia switching Hildon from GTK to QT without forking it; just because Nokia now wants to use QT doesn't obligate Intel and Canonical to join in. Nokia doing that (assuming it could even be done) would also cause Maemo upgrade pains, which they've already caused a lot of.