Yup. Write once, run on all major platforms.
Very good

Good morning, and thanks for the taking the time to read the post and for great comments. For the start I’ll reply to the big topics raised, and then tackle a few individual comments after the coffee break. Before I start though, be reminded that even though I’ll try to stick to facts, how I interpret them reflects my personal view as the Head of Qt R&D in Oslo.

On the topic of Stephen Elop – I will not start speculating here. He is CEO of Nokia, he has sold his Microsoft shares and invested into Nokia, and he has in my mind lived up to his promise of (brutally) honest and transparent decision making. He and everybody else in the company wants to turn Nokia around, and from all we have heard and seen so far he believes that Qt will play a part in that, both short term and long term. We might not like his smartphone strategy, but if we don’t believe what he and his management team say publicly, then this is not going to be a very constructive discussion.

Regarding the (financial or organizational) independence of Qt in Nokia – Trolltech wasn’t profitable for many years prior to the Nokia acquisition. After the acquisition we put Qt under the LGPL, and we have by now tripled the size of our team. We have invested significantly in our QA infrastructure (automation of quality gates and continuous integration), and there is much more travel between Oslo and Australia. However, assuming that each unit in a large organization has to be profitable to justify its existence is a bit of an oversimplification. Take Google: Android itself doesn’t make money – but it’s a vehicle that brings people into the Google-Internet which in turn increases advertisement revenue.
So financial aspects do as such IMHO not play into this – Qt is an investment, and whatever money we could possibly make with Qt commercial licenses or services would barely be a blip on the radar. As long as management trusts that Qt can help Nokia, management will fund Qt – and everything we believe, and everything we have heard from top-management during the last week, is that Qt as a part of the solution, not as part of the problem.

I consider our organization to be largely independent – we have our own roadmap, we decide what positions we prioritize when we hire, we decide who to hire etc. Naturally, much of our work during the last two years was driven by requirements from other parts of Nokia, and many of the things we started up ourselves were inspired by the new opportunities we saw when working for a leading device company. Our success is of course no longer measured exclusively in “number of Qt users” (although that is still a very relevant metrics), and finding out how our success will be measured is work in progress as part of the strategy change.

I like to believe that Qt as a technology is independent of Nokia, thanks to the community of Qt users and thanks to Open Governance. There is a lot of momentum behind Qt most of which is independent of being able to target Symbian devices with Qt, and many of us get a lot of motivation from working on a technology that transcends short-term product needs and changing corporate strategies.

Qt on the desktop is currently not a priority for our R&D team [edit on February 21st: since this was frequently misunderstood as "We don't care about the desktop version of Qt", please follow the discussion further down, ie in http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/18/buckets-of-cold-water/#comment-19426 and http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/18/buckets-of-cold-water/#comment-19485 ], even though Nokia does use Qt for desktop applications (and not only Qt Creator). That doesn’t mean that nobody is working on it, however we do believe that Qt is a great development tool for desktop applications, even if we just maintain it and keep it working on the desktop platforms. We definitely want to keep it that way, and we continue to improve and modernize Qt on the desktop as well, but I personally don’t really see that there are a lot of new features we could add to make Qt significantly more powerful for desktop development (esp features that are already provided by other libraries – why cannibalize our own community?). And lastly, even with 260 engineers and growing, there is only a finite amount of work we can do, and right now we prioritize getting Qt into top-shape for embedded platforms. We do expect that many of the improvements we make there will also bring value back to desktop developers – for instance, we are working on some exciting stuff with QML, accessibility, HTML5 and improved localization support.

So, what happens 2 years from now when the last Symbian device has shipped? I don’t have that kind of crystal ball, and I generally prefer the presence to the future. From looking at the presence I believe that making Qt’s future depend on the organizations behind non-competitive Symbian devices or a single MeeGo device in 2011 would have been a strategic mistake. On one of our whiteboards in the hallway somebody quoted Abraham Lincoln: “The best way to predict the future is to create it”. Since Friday 11th we have a real chance of doing exactly that.