Hi Mark, nice post with good technical insight.

Now, you know that software is developed by people with goals. In theory you can look at a toolkit and conclude that it will take this time for this amount of people to come up with a release. In practice this doesn't work like this.

Remember how was life around Qt only 2 years ago. Trolltech was a company in Norway. Symbian was a closed core OS developed by a company in the UK. There was S60 developed in a closed environment by several companies. Maemo was a GTK+ based platform pushed by a small team living basically out of the Nokia mainstream software strategy.

Now, at which point and at a which cost would you have been able to create the single team developing the toolkit to make everybody happy? Qt, Symbian and Maemo have different stakeholders with some overlaps. They have slightly different ways of working. The three organizations are going through huge transformations and in the meantime they have roadmaps, releases and products going out to the market. And yet they still have own goals, even if they complement each other and are sometimes common.

And yet they are converging their interests and releases around Qt, taking care of their own goals and stakeholder while adding on top instead of forking or reinventing. The three organizations are committed to open source development and early pre-releases, and this is why you have the elements to start this discussion in the first place. This public exposure and this long road to stable releases will fine tune a lot of what can be improved together.

I still believe this discussion will be more useful when we have concrete SDKs and platform releases to compare. The day someone comes pointing to duplicated, pointless or missing features then we will be able to have a proper technical discussion.

In the meantime we must play this game where you are the apocalyptics and we are the integrated, when actually the picture is more interesting than that.

Note that this multiparty exercise (that includes you) has a chance of big success precisely because the setting is more wide and diverse. This is one of the reasons why I think I'm working in the right platform and in the right direction, even if the story is not always as simple to explain as I'd wish.