Here is interview of Juha Seppä who works in Devices group's R&D unit. Article says "Juha Seppä sanoo, että perusidea on parantaa nykyisiä Series 40-, S60- ja Maemo-alustoja tuomalla Qt niihin." which means something like "Juha Seppä says, that basic idea is to improve current Series 40-, S60 and Maemo -platforms by bringing Qt to those". So it looks like something is coming to Maemo.

Nokia would be outright stupid not switching to Qt/KDE in mid-, long-term. PB singlehandedly brough to Nxxx really big percentage of projects available on garage.maemo.org and dispersed on Web thanks to power of Qt/KDE libraries - including such crucial ones like KDE-PIM and KOffice. With minor support from Nokia it could be even easier.

However many decisions from Nokia regarding Internet Tablet series are bordering on stupidity...

What's so bad about Gtk/Maemo that's so much better with Qt/KDE? Everybody seems to cry that Qt/KDE is the holy grail of desktop experience, but nobody mentions any arguments to back it up.

Qt is not free, is owned by company (which now happens to be Nokia), is only GPL'd for noncommercial development, and Nokia will have no problem keeping their commercially used Qt version closed source. Non-GPL software may not even link to a GPL'd library anyway, so GPL appears to be a bad choice for an essential library such as a widget toolkit. Even if you had the GPL Qt on your desktop, closed source vendors such as Skype or Google may not use it, but have to install their own commercially licensed Qt version.
<personal-opinion>
Apart from that, KDE is a usability nightmare IMHO, but don't lets start a flamewar on this. GNOME isn't perfect either!
</personal-opinion>

As it appears, the acquisition of Trolltech by Nokia will drive even more commercial software to Gtk/GNOME.

It's not possible to GPL only for non-commercial development, so that's not really an issue. It's possible (by the copyright owner) to dual-license, and that's what Trolltech has been doing in the past. But the version that's GPL'ed will always be GPL'ed, and there are no limits to what kind of applications (commercial or not) can be developed.

In short, the restrictions you describe are not really there. I myself prefer to develop for GTK+, but that's just my personal preferences.

********. You can make commercial programs on GPL.

AFAIK, a GPL'd (v2) library does not allow non-GPL programs linking it. That's why there is LGPL. But Qt is _not_ LGPL'd.
Of course you can make commercial programs on GPL, but not closed-source programs.

Yes, Qtopia does run on the nokia tablets. Although there are quite a few missing pieces, and missing functionality. I haven't had the time to make it better.

and thats what we want - more free open source applications, and less closed source applications!

The LGPL restricts the rights of the users.

I agree entirely. I do run KDE on some desktops, but feel a bit guilty, betraying the open source movement.. If Qt had been free & open in 1996, Gnome mighht never have existed. Or We could have used QT in Gnomme. The QT license was liberalized only after a long time, during which Gnome developed.


But I'd urge everybody to relax. Given the rate of software development within Nokia, most of us will not live long enough to see a QT based N8xx OS or programs. By the time we see "hello world"' based on QT for N800, I expect we will all have electronic brain implants and we will use telepathy to exchange data. PB will have released his wrap of KDE-19.4 by then, and we will eagerly watch for the release of MS Windows 'radioactive sunrise' edition for windows 2025.

Maybe that's too sarcastic. But we will have flying cars that can go under water and cloning of humans will finally let the market settle the age old debate on whether men really prefer Pamela Anderson to Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan.

PJ
Keeping my day jobb

Yes, and rife with hyperbole. It's only been two years, maemo isn't exactly bursting with personnel, and we're only on step 3 of 5. Give it time, give it time.