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

[From: Klaus Rotter]

Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri wrote:
> 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

Until here you can think both of Maemo and Qt (aka Qtopia)

> used by Motorola, Sony and others already).

And this _may_ be the problem. There are already more devices with 
Qtopia on it and there will be more Nokia devices with Qtopia.
On the other side we have (actual N810, the N800 is no longer available 
in the German Nokia online store) a single internet tablet.

> 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

I think Motorola will use a commercial license, and so they don't have 
to release the source code. Nokia would be a fool to discontinue the GPL 
or the commercial license of Qt. In either way, they would loose market 
power.

I really like the look and feel of Maemo, but IMHO Qt's API is superior 
to the one of Gtk. The other advantage of Gtk is that there are no 
license fees (if I would go commercial closed-source with some 
applications). But this may be only an issue for hobby programmers, 
since for professionals the license fees of Qt aren't that heavy.

If you regard the Series 90 (Nokia 7710, see 
http://www.livingroom.org.au/cameraphone/images/7710_01.jpg) they had a 
similar look (and feel? don't know, just looked at them) like Maemo. So 
I think if Nokia would produce a new landscape cellular phone they would 
adapt Maemo's look-and-feel with Qtopia. This isn't that heavy. And then 
there's just a small step to build a internet tablet without a cellular 
phone.

I think many big companies would like to have more in-house competition 
than outside competition. And Nokia has enough money to to do so. But 
maybe in some years they will drop one.

-- 
  Klaus Rotter * klaus at rotters dot de * www.rotters.de