[maemo-developers] What does Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech mean to Maemo?

[From: Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

On Jan 28, 2008 2:25 PM,  <maemo at bitblit.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Jae Stutzman wrote:
>
> > This is really strange. We have stayed away from qt due to the
> > commercial license required to do proprietary apps. Gtk fits the bill
> > nicely for us, so where is the future of maemo now? This is quite
> > strange. Nokia reminds me of the weather in Texas...very unpredictable
> > :)
>
> As someone else pointed out: the press release specifically mentions
> S60 and S40 which are Symbian platforms, not Linux. Also mentions Open C
> which is a porting layer for Symbian OS.

Don't fool yourself. Qt is to Nokia what Linux was to IBM: the only
way to unify the development of various hardware platform. You can bet
it's no fun to develop libs to s40 and s60, so why leave internet
tablets out of this?

I don't see any action in the near future, but I'd like to see all the
platforms converging to Qt. Qt have good bindings for Python and Java,
at least. They provide excellent abstraction layer, portability and
many features, like Phone, Bluetooth and other stacks ready and
integrated. It can also use Qvfb or X11, with almost the same code, in
the end it's less or same work than having GTK and Hildon supported.

We also should remember that Qt always pushed the boundaries, it have
things like Arthur, the graphics engine, that provide many features we
(canola) could use and its optimized for OpenGL, OpenGL/ES and OpenVG.
They have WebKit and Phonon integrated (in contrast to 3rd part), they
have the scribe that matches pango.

As for the built software, there are lots of backend/infrastructure on
it, see the koffice: a small yet feature-full office implementation,
we'll be able to benefit from these components.

Ok, don't understand me wrong or even say that GTK or Gnome provide
some of these things. Yes, I know, we have webkit-gtk, gstreamer,
cairo, abiword, gnumeric and much more, but going Qt is not the end of
the world (but it's not _the_ solution either).

-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
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