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

[From: Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

On Jan 28, 2008 4:46 PM,  <maemo at bitblit.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri wrote:
>
> > 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?
>
> Why bother with getting Hildon changes accepted upstream then? Why bother
> with Gnome Mobile? This might be just a way of hedging bets.

dunno, I'm not them to know for sure. But the platform is there
already, works, supported, they have the hackers working for them,
it's not about something to come, it's something that exists (and is
used by Motorola, Sony and others already).

Also, they bought a market share, something they cannot do with Gnome.
Now they can use the power and ensure no other company will have such
a infrastructure as closed source. Motorola wants to use it? Do, but
release all their code under GPLv3, which also ensures they'll have to
enable users to reflash/install new apps in their devices.
   You simple cannot do that with Gnome.

Also, even Trolltech was not a big deal in terms of money, you can
imagine Gnome investments were not that costly, so getting Hildon and
other things accepted were a way to learn how to interact with
community.


> > 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,
>
> Personally, I dont like Java. Dont like Python much either.
> But there seems to be plenty of Python apps in maemo.
>
> > 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.
>
> Or it could mean putting some of those ideas into Hildon.

Why try to get something when you can have it already done? Maybe it
works, maybe not. when? nobody knows. They bought one product that has
more than 5 years in the area, and it's already a new version, that
is, they already did some mistakes and tried to make things better.


-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
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