Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Wow...that's a good news.
Should we discuss it a bit ?

http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2008/01/trolltech-good.html

and

http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1185531

I think we'll "soon" see both GTK and QT living together ?
Or it's something they're planning for a future device ?

What do you guys think ?

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

QT and GTK already live together. I can't remember the last time I have had any problems running QT apps in a Gnome environment or vice versa.

A few years ago, the leaders of both projects woke up to the fact that a raising tide lifts all boats and more compatibility in Linux desktop environments would make them more popular and help both projects. They were just wasting effort and shooting themselves in the foot by slinging mud at each other.

The Internet tablet likely has room for both QT and GTK libraries so hopefully this predicts future ease in porting KDE apps into the maemo environment without having to install the entire KDM.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

I meant a more integrated "living together".
Like having a common Hildon frontend to the user (i.e. either Qt applications and GTK ones, looking similar).
That would mean more resources, but I think it'll be accepted for a transitional period.
I think Maemo's going to switch to QT in the long term.

Exactly.
Okay, so it looks like good news for us.
As long as Nokia's Trolltech remains on the same open source path it has been so far.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

I think they are more interested by the Mobile OS nammed : "Qtopia Phone Edition" for their phones.

"I think Maemo's going to switch to QT in the long term." Oh no ! Please not that !

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

I too was thinking about QTopia and trying not to relate Nokia's acquisition with Maemo. But Ari's speaking here.
So a link has to be found.
What about a WiMax enabled tablet with Qtopia on it ?

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

I don't think they will just leave their current GTK stuff behind. Perhaps we'll get qt4 libs for Maemo(with OSK and all that).

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

i'm afraid nokia is control freak, so once they control qt, they will abandon gtk (and gnome). of course, this will not happen overnight.

if nokia's internet tablets are successful enough, they will probably try to port maemo to qt. from businessman point of view, supporting two frameworks (one being controlled) is not reasonable (unfortunately).

as for running gtk and qt simultaneously. while possible, i think for such restricted device as n800, it would be very inefficient.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

one more point. they intend to use qt across many (all?) platforms, so qt will be definately in future internet tablets.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

hyartep, where did you get all this info from? Certainly from the press releases that I have read I can not infer half of the things that you have written to be the truth.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Very interesting news. I have great expectations for OS2009 :)

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

IMHO, Symbian is overstretched and bent to fit on some smart phones - e.g. the E90, and linux has proven that it can be very effective in a consumer environment (TomTom GO, Nokia tablets, Motorola phones), so maybe the success of the 800 & 810 will mean a proper linux smartphone from Nokia? If so, OpenMoko will need to make a leap ahead, and speed up development, as they're a long way off a general-purpose fit-for-consumer distribution.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Not sure it's a good news for commercial qt..

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

I'd love to see more C++ on maemo!

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

It's not Symbian that's overstretched, but rather S60. Symbian itself scales effortlessly, but S60 really never was intended for more than a tiny screen and T9 text input.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

C++ is a pain IMHO concerning shared libraries. This would open up dependency hell on the tablets. Please keep C++ away from the tablets.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

I'm surprised we haven't heard from penguinbait yet. I bet this news will make for less effort in his KDE-on-NIT project.

I also sort of wonder, in the back of my mind, if this might lead to KDE-on-NIT (or something a lot like it) being the official Maemo GUI.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Okay, Visual Basic then.

:p

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

I couldn't agree more. C++ is the dullard's version of OOP in C. Better to go with Objective-C, or even just do your high level app development in a language that isn't C based at all.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Another article: http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/28/news...ce=yahoo_quote

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

I wonder how this affect Maemo as a whole. I guess an updated Qt library for Maemo will be released and current Qt-based apps will be easier to port. It's either that or Maemo will be replaced by KDE, which is a bit too drastic.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Considering that some of Nokias competitors (like Motorola, Panasonic and Sony) use Qt, i would not be surprised if Nokia tried to close Qt development as far as possible to have the an advantage over the other users..

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

I guess they really saved money from that Germany plant

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Wasn't QT GPL-ed recently?

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Yes but that doesn't mean future versions/extensions have to be...

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

According to Trolltech:

"In Trolltech, we have for a long time had a vision of “Qt Everywhere”. Being acquired by Nokia, we will continue to provide you with the most advanced cross-platform software framework for desktop and devices in the market. There will be further investments in Qt and Qtopia and an even better long-term security in your decision to choose Trolltech for your business."

I don't think Trolltech will be foolish enough to drop support to their current clients. For current clients to look for other solutions -- that's another matter.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

It's not that I'm enjoying the role of Suspicious Muttering Bastard [*], but does anyone remember what happened when Nokia took over the Bluetooth Applet project from community developers and gave us their own, "improved" version?

____
[*]: Yeah, I lie: I so do like that role.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Yeah, the icon turned blue. :p

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Maemo is more than just the GUI isn't it? It's Nokia's linux platform as a whole (Debian + Hildon + core Apps), isn't it? Isn't it more like Hildon would get replaced by KDE? KDE would become the GUI component of Maemo?

It would be drastic... but would it be better? (I honestly don't know) You'd get all of the things that come with KDE. You might lose some of the things that Hildon had. You'll be disrupting something that was already trying to solidify and stabilize for mass market consumption. (but maybe KDE will bring that solidified/stabilized presence?)

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Personally I prefer developing for GTK+ much more than QT, because most development in QT is done in C++.. which I dislike intensely. Even something as (at this stage) rudimentary as the Vala quasi-compiler w/gtk/Hildon looks as a much better option for me at least.

As for the announcement, I have to agree with that anonymous commenter (see the original blog) who questioned the strategy as far as Maemo is concerned. (For mobile phone systems I guess it's possible to see a way though.)

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

This can be nothing but wonderful news. What does it mean? who knows, I like the qt everywhere sound. Perhaps a custom qt based OS, I prefer that they stay away from embedded, Perhaps an optimized version of KDE in the future for mid-size screens. Could it mean when I turn on my Nokia device I have a choice like on every other linux system. Perhaps some eyes are opening, and that can only be good news.

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.