Yes, but 1 year from now Symbian^4 devices will only just be shipping, I'm assuming Maemo 6 is intending to be out slightly ahead of that. So it doesn't really matter what version of Qt the firmware has to be built with and what you build on top of it as long as developers can get a real cross-platform solution in time for devices hitting the market and the Qt version is easily upgradeable (i.e. automatic if an app has a dependency on a later version).

It was not my intention to suggest that any of the engineering teams were arrogant - that has never been my experience of Nokia staff and I apologise if I caused offence. Of course the Maemo organisation is growing pretty fast, so no engineers there should have been concerned for their jobs. I was deliberately trying to avoid pointing fingers directly and anyone so I'm happy to leave the speculation on reasons for the mess there.

It breaks source compatibility. I can no longer build and test my UI against standard Linux (or Windows or Mac) Qt for a faster compile-debug-edit cycle. Ideally I want to be able to build a large subset of possible applications that look native without going near anything platform-specific. If I have to use platform-specific stuff then it should be a couple of lines with a #ifdef or something I can easily encapsulate using the private implementation pattern.

I've ported Qt apps between platforms and added platform-specific stuff - even for the rather different strand that was Qtopia, the changes are still very minor. This Dui stuff is in a different ballpark in terms of effort as far as I can see, contrary to what Lorn Potter is suggesting further up the thread. Qt Mobility is obviously going to take some time to get really good functionality coverage as they have to write separate backends for each platform, but if UI code can't be cross-platform from day 1, what can?

Well, if these things really need to be initialized separately for every Maemo application then there should be a Maemo-specific implementation of QApplicationPrivate - surely that's exactly what the private implementation pattern is for?

Let my try to make it clear how much of a disconnect there is between the strategy (at least as I understood it) and the implementation. At the presentation on the selection and acquisition of Qt (and reasons for) at the Nokia Developer Summit in Monaco last year, it stated that Nokia realised they were building 4 or 5 versions of each of their applications and this was incredibly wasteful - what's more, 3rd party developers would have the same problem. They immediately ditched Series 80 and 90 and then started working on a replacement cross-platform framework plan for the remaining platforms so they could build applications and services once that worked across the entire portfolio. They bought Qt and everyone was happy.

It's really important that Symbian and Maemo be compatible. Symbian has a real shortage of decent free apps and Maemo has almost no decent commercial apps. If most apps are trivially portable between the two then both will get a significant benefit. If not, many commercial developers won't bother with a Maemo port initially because of the low volumes and we aren't likely to see many ports of free software to Symbian either (because as we've seen in this thread, most free software guys don't care about Symbian). I thought this was very clearly understood. Indeed just in December Peter Schneider was speaking at the same developer event as me in Sweden and said that Maemo is depending on Symbian's volumes to get the commercial app developers in the first couple of years.

However, if you need to do a complete UI re-write - is that really going to happen. It certainly didn't on Symbian for S60 vs UIQ in most cases.

Now maybe the plan is still as I thought it was and all of this is just interim measures while Qt evolves to cover the new UI paradigm and mobility stuff? If that was genuinely seen as a business necessity then what thought has gone into what 3rd party developers should do? Forum Nokia is telling everyone to start working with pure Qt now? Is that going to produce the results anyone wants?