The title is incorrect -- the original was, "Leadership, Strategy and Qt". Nokia has not at this point fired the Qt team. They fired the folks in the Ulm office. Those are not the guys that formerly worked for Trolltech (in Oslo, Brisbane and Berlin). While there's naturally some uncertainty about what their futures will hold, the axe hasn't totally fallen yet.
Edit: To be clear, I my intent wasn't to question Mirko, but to point out that the title here was added on HN; it wasn't the title he used and I didn't read his post as saying the entire Qt team was fired.
This is actually my understanding as well, which is leaving me quite a bit confused about Mirko's post. I trust him, however, and he's currently attending the Qt Contributor Summit while I am not, so he may be more up-to-date. But the total number of Qt staff employed by Nokia is certainly above 100, too.
4 1/2 years later, Nokia is pulling the trigger on it.
My question is this, if Trolltech wasn't part of Nokia's strategy anymore, why not just spin it out?
And to compare to an equivalent business, Novell tried to shutter down Mono, thankfully the people behind it forged a new company out of it, called Xamarin.
I keep seeing cases of companies being acquired, only to then be semi-destroyed or shut down later on. Sometimes you get the impression the the acquirers only want to buy others just to shut them down and stop them becoming a threat.
For example, look at what Google did to Jaiku, or Slide, or Dodgeball.
I'm coming to the view that when you start up a business, if you care about what you've built more than you care about money, and what you've built is profitable, then you shouldn't sell to a big company, because chances are they will destroy it.
Let's be clear, though: Nokia also did a lot of good for Qt. They significantly grew the number of people paid to work on it, and by moving to the LGPL license they significantly grew the community.
They also turned it into a proper open source project. There was no public repository history under Trolltech. Nor did Qt under Trolltech have a working contribution process; now tens of thousands of contributions have flown into Qt from the outside. There's even review rights and write access for non-employees, and maintainers that are non-employees.
Qt today has a much better chance of surviving Nokia than it had a chance of surviving Trolltech back in the day.
"My question is this, if Trolltech wasn't part of Nokia's strategy anymore, why not just spin it out?"
Because they think it will bring in less than what it costs them to sell it?
You cannot just put a "on sale" sticker on part of a company and sell it. It will take an effort to find a buyer, and one (likely a larger one) to define what the sale will contain (patents? Copyrights? What source code? Which employment contracts? Pension rights? Etc.
Why defend Elop? He is a big reason Nokia is failing.
They could have had something great with Meego. The N9 was selling well even though Elop was trying to destroy it. Why else would he fail to disclose sales of the N9?
The N9 may have outsold the Lumias in Q4 last year even with this lack of support.
I can't understand how anyone can defend a CEO who takes a company with a few mature operating systems and goes to his old employers company and uses their juvenile product instead? What the fuck, people?
This is a complicated question, and at this time it's impossible to answer it without heading into the realm of speculation. I'm going to try anyway, to at least put some of the facts out there that many outside the direct community may not be aware of.
First of, the Qt Project, that is the sum of all contributors within Nokia and without and so also including KDE, is currently busy putting together the next major generation of the technology, Qt 5. But our ongoing 4.x release series is still based on Qt 4, which Nokia's developers have not been targeting for a while now. Instead, commercial support of Qt 4 has passed to Digia some time ago, and they have been putting out new point releases since. So in the short term, this will not affect upcoming releases of KDE's platform, workspaces and applications.
In the longer term, the loss of the Nokia-employed workforce would obviously hurt the Qt Project considerably. Hopefully, however, this loss would not actually be quite that complete: It's unclear at this point whether Nokia might try to sell Qt, which could preserve the workforce entirely in the best case scenario. Alternatively, many of the developers who spent much or all of their professional careers working and loving Qt would likely band together and go on in some way, or find new homes at any of the Qt-focussed software development consultancies out there, which might also band together with us and others in the community to form a new home for the project in Nokia's absence.
I would wager that Qt's chances of survival are greater than Nokia's. With Nokia's current Microsoftian strategy, the earlier they part ways, the better for Qt.
Hi! This headline is wrong, and out of context. I made the post more clear in that regard.
Also, our server broke down under the requests, so please be patient :-)
Did Nokia even made money from QT ? Because it seems to me it paid 700 devs (the article mentions 10000 !!! people laid off) + Accenture (for Symbian development) without really making any real money from this.
RIM has contracted KDAB to port Qt 4.8 and Qt 5 to the BlackBerry PlayBook and BlackBerry 10. I think we'll see RIM react to this announcement by hiring more developers. We've already seen that happen, see the postings below.
> Any chance the team will stick together and recreate Troll Tech? Kind of like the Ximian/Mono team formed Xamarin after being fired from Novel?
The Mono team did not recreate what they had in Novell.
1. Mono in Novell put a lot of work on building Mono as a general platform. Xamarin is focused on where the money is: Mono for Android and iOS.
2. Mono in Novell was developed to form part of the SUSE Linux desktop. Xamarin does not do Linux, and in fact the devs themselves have apparently mostly personally switched to OS X.
3. Practically all Mono work at Novell was open source. Most of the work at Xamarin is closed source, the business model is to sell software for iOS and Android.
There's nothing wrong with either model, but just pointing out, they didn't just recreate the same thing outside of Novell. The two situations are hugely different, so it isn't surprising they are not that similar.
There's little need, Qt bootstrapped a new community-lead process a few months back, the project is independent of Nokia already (and there is sufficient critical mass in the user base to keep the project alive).
As for major new development, well, what is lost is a matter of opinion. Already with Qt5 the focus is no longer on native widgets (it's vaguely shocking how the project's path while at Nokia has got so distorted and diverged from the story that made Qt a success).
I think it will be beneficial for Qt; for a few recent years Nokia is a sort of anti-Midas -- whatever they hold or touch turns into junk (Symbian buried, phone Meego wasted, computer Meego demolished...). Plus it is a chance for Qt to finally end with this commercial burden dangling since TrollTech.
I've read quite a few comments about what happens to Qt next. Short answer is, well no one knows. Long answer is that it's all open source, there's a lot of people using it for commercial products (myself included) who are committed to it.
Will the pace of progress slow down? Sure, you're going to be losing a lot of developers all in one go, who made the majority of the commits. Is it game over? Well, no, it will end up community lead by the very smart cookies in the community.
It's hugely sad Nokia has gotten rid of it, but if they hadn't it wouldn't have made any sense. They don't use it and they'll struggle to find uses for it now unless they ported it to Windows Phone 8, but that's a whole other level of interesting fantasy.
> if Android was based on Qt/c++, not java, then Android would be the perfect platform!
No, it wouldn't. It's significantly easier for bad developers to make mistakes in C++ than in Java (one of Java's few advantages). Manual memory management alone would account for a significant increase in crashy apps. And while afaik, iOS has manual memory management, it also has Apple's App Store review process to at least ensure apps don't crash from a segfault every second launch, or similar issues.
I don't think this is all that sad. I think it is good to see that Nokia is focused on its new main strategy, and at least attempting to save itself.
Consider the alternative; continuing internal struggles between the Windows and Symbian/Qt teams, funding all sorts of frivolous projects while strapped for cash. With Windows Nokia has a chance of surviving (although it doesn't look all that brigh right now), but without focus and determination death is certain.
[+] [-] wheels|13 years ago|reply
Edit: To be clear, I my intent wasn't to question Mirko, but to point out that the title here was added on HN; it wasn't the title he used and I didn't read his post as saying the entire Qt team was fired.
[+] [-] sho_hn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulbjensen|13 years ago|reply
4 1/2 years later, Nokia is pulling the trigger on it.
My question is this, if Trolltech wasn't part of Nokia's strategy anymore, why not just spin it out?
And to compare to an equivalent business, Novell tried to shutter down Mono, thankfully the people behind it forged a new company out of it, called Xamarin.
I keep seeing cases of companies being acquired, only to then be semi-destroyed or shut down later on. Sometimes you get the impression the the acquirers only want to buy others just to shut them down and stop them becoming a threat.
For example, look at what Google did to Jaiku, or Slide, or Dodgeball.
Why can they not follow the example of HP and Agilent? Agilent was spun out of HP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies
I'm coming to the view that when you start up a business, if you care about what you've built more than you care about money, and what you've built is profitable, then you shouldn't sell to a big company, because chances are they will destroy it.
[+] [-] sho_hn|13 years ago|reply
They also turned it into a proper open source project. There was no public repository history under Trolltech. Nor did Qt under Trolltech have a working contribution process; now tens of thousands of contributions have flown into Qt from the outside. There's even review rights and write access for non-employees, and maintainers that are non-employees.
Qt today has a much better chance of surviving Nokia than it had a chance of surviving Trolltech back in the day.
[+] [-] Someone|13 years ago|reply
Because they think it will bring in less than what it costs them to sell it?
You cannot just put a "on sale" sticker on part of a company and sell it. It will take an effort to find a buyer, and one (likely a larger one) to define what the sale will contain (patents? Copyrights? What source code? Which employment contracts? Pension rights? Etc.
[+] [-] simplexion|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twelvechairs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netvarun|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sho_hn|13 years ago|reply
First of, the Qt Project, that is the sum of all contributors within Nokia and without and so also including KDE, is currently busy putting together the next major generation of the technology, Qt 5. But our ongoing 4.x release series is still based on Qt 4, which Nokia's developers have not been targeting for a while now. Instead, commercial support of Qt 4 has passed to Digia some time ago, and they have been putting out new point releases since. So in the short term, this will not affect upcoming releases of KDE's platform, workspaces and applications.
In the longer term, the loss of the Nokia-employed workforce would obviously hurt the Qt Project considerably. Hopefully, however, this loss would not actually be quite that complete: It's unclear at this point whether Nokia might try to sell Qt, which could preserve the workforce entirely in the best case scenario. Alternatively, many of the developers who spent much or all of their professional careers working and loving Qt would likely band together and go on in some way, or find new homes at any of the Qt-focussed software development consultancies out there, which might also band together with us and others in the community to form a new home for the project in Nokia's absence.
For the cynics and skeptics in the audience, it also always pays to remind everyone that for the worst case, the community does have a poison pill in place: http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p...
[+] [-] moondowner|13 years ago|reply
http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p...
I think they will manage somehow...
[+] [-] somepony|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Derbasti|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirkoboehm|13 years ago|reply
Cheers, Mirko.
[+] [-] mariusmg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CrLf|13 years ago|reply
I only used Qt briefly, but it was the only time I actually had fun programming in C++.
[+] [-] HorizonXP|13 years ago|reply
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QAwzH5I...
http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/17584
[+] [-] abrahamsen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azakai|13 years ago|reply
The Mono team did not recreate what they had in Novell.
1. Mono in Novell put a lot of work on building Mono as a general platform. Xamarin is focused on where the money is: Mono for Android and iOS.
2. Mono in Novell was developed to form part of the SUSE Linux desktop. Xamarin does not do Linux, and in fact the devs themselves have apparently mostly personally switched to OS X.
3. Practically all Mono work at Novell was open source. Most of the work at Xamarin is closed source, the business model is to sell software for iOS and Android.
There's nothing wrong with either model, but just pointing out, they didn't just recreate the same thing outside of Novell. The two situations are hugely different, so it isn't surprising they are not that similar.
[+] [-] forgotusername|13 years ago|reply
As for major new development, well, what is lost is a matter of opinion. Already with Qt5 the focus is no longer on native widgets (it's vaguely shocking how the project's path while at Nokia has got so distorted and diverged from the story that made Qt a success).
[+] [-] mbq|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicholassmith|13 years ago|reply
Will the pace of progress slow down? Sure, you're going to be losing a lot of developers all in one go, who made the majority of the commits. Is it game over? Well, no, it will end up community lead by the very smart cookies in the community.
It's hugely sad Nokia has gotten rid of it, but if they hadn't it wouldn't have made any sense. They don't use it and they'll struggle to find uses for it now unless they ported it to Windows Phone 8, but that's a whole other level of interesting fantasy.
[+] [-] stewie2|13 years ago|reply
Google should buy Qt. if Android was based on Qt/c++, not java, then Android would be the perfect platform!
[+] [-] Macha|13 years ago|reply
No, it wouldn't. It's significantly easier for bad developers to make mistakes in C++ than in Java (one of Java's few advantages). Manual memory management alone would account for a significant increase in crashy apps. And while afaik, iOS has manual memory management, it also has Apple's App Store review process to at least ensure apps don't crash from a segfault every second launch, or similar issues.
[+] [-] stewie2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HorizonXP|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msfanboy|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] p_o_l_o_s|13 years ago|reply
Thanks and goodbye, but thanks!
[+] [-] zokier|13 years ago|reply
Consider the alternative; continuing internal struggles between the Windows and Symbian/Qt teams, funding all sorts of frivolous projects while strapped for cash. With Windows Nokia has a chance of surviving (although it doesn't look all that brigh right now), but without focus and determination death is certain.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] invaderzim|13 years ago|reply
http://planetkde.org/
[+] [-] mseepgood|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlitwiniuk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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