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

[From: Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

disclaimer: all that I say is my personal opinion, and not the opinion
o my employee.


On Jan 29, 2008 8:56 AM, Klaus Rotter <klaus at rotters.de> wrote:
> 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.

devices against devices, people that attended last events and meet
moto guys already heard that they were already experimenting with
other techs including gtk. Also gtk was being used by OpenMoko, so if
it continued we might have the situation I said.


> > 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.

read what I say and you'll see what you said is a bit switched. I know
Motorola is using commercial license, exactly because of that it's
unknown if Nokia will issue licenses to the competitor or if the
competitor will want licenses from it.

As for nokia discontinue GPL version, it would suffer, since most Q&A
is done by desktop users, and it's a good playground to be ahead of
time (the desktop hardware of today may be the embedded of tomorrow,
performance wise).

Also, Trolltech/Qt have a clause that if no GPL release is made within
some period of time, the last release will be made BSD. So community
can relicense it to what they want, maybe still GPL, maybe LGPL, ...
and they'll get some pressure from other companies, that can use the
code and give nothing back.


> 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.

hobby devs can/should use gpl. if it's a hobby, releasing as gpl would
be a natural choice.


> 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.

that's for sure.

-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
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