Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.

You have your Qt software, it works for you and does what you need it to do. If Nokia abandons it, you will still have it, it will still work. Won't it?

The only issue I see is that as time goes by new hardware will arrive on which perhaps Qt won't work. Is that your concern? That is precisely why I am no longer using Ami Pro, a word processor that for my uses was hugely superior to MicroBloat Word, and if future hardware compatibility is the stumbling block, then yes you have something to worry about.


The issue is much more subtle than this. Nokia purchased Trolltech (the developers of Qt) a few years back, Qt is/was a substantial framework for developing applications, such that it was sold on a per developer per platform license, each license running into several thousand euros.

For all intents and purposes, the Desktop "port" of Qt has now been in a state is stagnating for the last years, gaining features which have come from the mobile "port", nothing even remotely desktop oriented has been added during this period.

Now, I'm not saying that I'd have expected anything less from Nokia, after all, they're a mobile phone company and they did relicense it under the LGPL. They do continue to sell commerical licenses and by their own admission, they have 4000+ commercial licencees.

With the death of symbian (yes yes, Nokia are still going to ship 150 million dead on arrival symbian devices over the next couple of years) it's hard to see how Qt possibly fits into their portfolio now. They keep stating that MeeGo will continue to use Qt, but given that they've not actually shipped any MeeGo devices and their new partnership with Microsoft, it's hard to imagine why they would continue to pump vast amounts of cash and time (the Qt team is fairly large) into something which is unlikely to give anything back.

Now this leaves Qt currently in a position where Nokia keep saying (half heartedly) that they're committed to it but basing it soley on devices they haven't shipped and on platforms that aren't even ready.

This I imagine is a serious worry for those with commercial licenses, anybody who has purchased a commercial license in the last couple of years has seen nothing but bug fixes and "mobile enhancements".

It's a real shame, because Qt is just an amazing framework with a decent set of tools, the only way I can see that it can survive and flourish is if Qt becomes a separate business entity once again, but because Nokia LGPL'd it, it's going to be a much harder sell for the commercial licenses.

Adrian