Qt's future in the light of Nokia-Microsoft partnership

Question

In case you missed it, a lot has happened in the last two day that could potentially impact the Qt framework, for the worse. :-( It will impact the mobile sector in several and probably not currently acknowledged ways, for sure.

It started yesterday with Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop internal letter depicting Nokia sitting on a burning platform and the need for a big and aggressive shift in business.

A day later, at the Nokia World conference, Nokia announced the partnership with Microsoft, which at the moment resumes to Nokia adopting the Windows Phone 7 platform and development environment, dumping Symbian along the road and tagging Meego as R&D(a pretty dangerous keyword if you ask me), as for Maemo/N900 series I guess it's bye bye for good. I know what you're thinking but no, Qt is not going to be ported to the Window Phone platform. And I'm also scared about this. You can watch the Elop & Ballmer joint press release here.

Now after reading this huge thread on the Qt-interest mailing list I can't help but wonder, what is the future of Qt at Nokia, now that they aren't focused(at all?) on Qt anymore(remember the full focus switch on Qt as main development framework for all Nokia products(including Symbian, yes) back in October?).

I love Qt, in my opinion it is the only true cross-platform application development framework and one of the few to make C++ development a joy(to the extent possible) and good things has happened to the framework and considerable momentum while under Nokia, thus i am wondering, what are the chances that Qt might suffer a slow death at Nokia after this? Yes i know about KDE.org and the fact that Qt is easily spawnable, but I still feel uneasy.

It also must be horrible for all of the efforts either by Nokia employees or third parties that have gone into Symbian and all of the Ovi Store Symbian/Qt content and business and why not, Maemo/Meego. There are also massive layoffs planned, I suspect Symbian techs and Qt?

I'd love to hear your input on this? Is Qt future safe&proof?

LE: The question as been gradually revised, improved and better referenced, thus you might want to throw a quick re-read to see what you might have missed.

Answer 1

If Nokia kills support for Qt I think it's still a safe bet as an API for desktop development. Before Qt was completely opened up there were two versions of the library, and the KDE team managed to work with the open source version, and these days there is a much strong focus in the KDE community on making KDE available cross platform, so I could see them keeping up development on Qt even if Nokia abandons the project.

Gnome and GTK+ do seem to have wider commercial support overall, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that another big player might either buy the Qt team from Nokia, or that developers will get hired away to work on Qt for other companies.

That said, I would hope that the execs as Nokia would realize that getting completely on board with WP7 is not the greatest idea, and that they are in fact keeping meego and Qt in R&D with the intention of continuing funding on it as a way of hedging against the failure of WP7 (or just getting a bad deal from Microsoft, as they have a reputation of doing to their partners in deals like this).

Answer 2

I must admit that I'm confused by this decision. From what I've heard, WP7's sales are so embarrassingly bad that Microsoft won't even publish sales numbers, only "units shipped". Seems to me that trying to improve your mobile positioning by tying yourself to Windows Phone 7 is a lot like a man on a sinking ship grabbing ahold of the anchor to try and keep afloat.

And since QT is a native code framework, and WP7 is supposed to only work with Silverlight and XNA, (with a few very specific exceptions,) this doesn't really gain Microsoft much either, unless they're going to radically rework their development kit.

Answer 3

My guess would be that Qt as a mobile framework is fscked, permanently.

As a cross-platform desktop toolkit though it probably has a fairly stable future, until MS decides to break any and all native development and force everyone into .NET.

Answer 4

Qt is GPL software. Since KDE depends on it, and it's useful to others outside of Nokia, I think that you'll see an open source foundation make a fork and run with it if Microsoft or Nokia actually does try to mangle the Qt management structure in a way that's not conducive for the community.

Answer 5

In the long run, those events will actually be good for QT's future. QT's strenght is the desktop, but Nokia might have forced it to become a touch-UI toolkit for smartphones. Now that Nokia doesn't really need it any longer, it will probably sell it to a party that has better use for it, a party that cares more about PCs, the desktop, and of course desktop software developers.

Answer 6

Microsoft did that with Borland before - CEO - ex M$ guy -> next kill the company that is for reference of all Nokia shareholders. About Qt - probably slowly will go away -that is really sad -because is the best framework right now - compare with wxWidgets, .Net /Mono/ etc. If you do not have the support from commercial developers - the framework is like a hobby for bunch of talented programmers , but without clear vision where is going. Again from the history of M$ - probably the best Qt developers will go to work for M$.- reference Delphi - .Net

Answer 7

Someone (the original owners mayhap) might still buy TrollTech from Nokia and they can again exist as a separate company. I suppose Nokia won't mind getting rid of non-core business.

And yeah, it's open source, but it's always nice to have some commercial backing that drives the platform forward.

Answer 8

From press release.

Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same. With 200 million users worldwide and Nokia planning to sell around 150 million more Symbian devices, Symbian still offers unparalleled geographical scale for developers.
Extending the scope of Qt further will be our first MeeGo-related open source device, which we plan to ship later this year. Though our plans for MeeGo have been adapted in light of our planned partnership with Microsoft, that device will be compatible with applications developed within the Qt framework and so give Qt developers a further device to target.

Answer 9

This is going to be a great partnership. The world's leading phone manufacturer with an awesome OS. It will get better and better. Just look at iOS. When it was released it was laughable and now it is rocking. Android and Apple better be paying attention.

Answer 10

Digia bought Qt from Nokia in 2012. They are focused on the mobile market and QML, but Qt Widgets and the C++ API are still supported. Qt's future is safe&proof.