Free Software and Linux

This blog article of Qt at the site of Nokia released yesterday is quick to clarify that, contrary to what some are predicting, this framework is not dead and, in fact, this is the best time in history ( ?). The post also states that Qt will live on Symbian, Meegan, industries and non-mobile platforms, "citing also the CTO of Nokia making the following statements:

• "We're still huge fans" (Qt).
• "We still continue to work on Qt is better."
• "In the mobile segment will examine the technologies Qt" (?)
• "Quick Qt platform is proving to be incredibly productive."
• "We will continue upgrading devices with newer versions of Qt and Qt Quick" (referring to Symbian)

However, the 175 reviews (as I write this) in that article are devastating, filled with disbelief and even recentemente.

An example of typical comment:

"Qt, via Symbian and Meegan, would be in more than a billion phones in the next decade with hundreds of thousands of the applications being created and bought Qt for OVI. That represented a huge potential revenue would supplement the environment goblal Qt with millions of dollars flowing through the hands of companies Qt, its employees and independent developers. "

"Only in my case, I quit my job six months ago to focus on learning Qt planning to earn some income from OVI ... all this was completed, that future was crushed."

And why not another:

"Qt / Desktop has become a second class citizen from the purchase of Nokia. In the last year were only Qt releases have been bug fixes to the entire ecosystem of Qt and additions (only) to the mobile world" .

In view of the recent alliance between Nokia and Microsoft, perhaps the future of Qt in the hands of the first would be better assured if a Qt for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) had been in the plans from the beginning, but we all know it is not so . The other comment on Reddit informadísimo explains why it does not ever happen:

Microsoft is determined not to allow development to WP7 with native code, that is, with no other API other than Silverlight or XNA and exclude outright the possibility of Qt for WP7 (and even running WinCE legacy code) . And the reason for this decision is simple: eventually, Microsoft would plan to merge the code with the Windows WP7, and that would be much easier with this scheme.

Posted in VivaLinux! , filed in Events and tagged with Nokia , Ouch! , Programming , Qt and Symbian .

This news automatically translated from a Finnish newspaper said that last Friday, the same day it announced an agreement between Nokia and Microsoft, "hundreds" of the 1500 employees working on Symbian Nokia marched in a protest demonstration against the intention of company to abandon the OS.

Some of the employees, all concerned about the continuity of their jobs, did not return to their jobs.

The atmosphere of uncertainty appears to be filled with contradictions, worsened by the lack of clarification from the executives, who did not answer many questions after the press conference where he announced the new direction of the company.

Posted in VivaLinux! , filed in Events and tagged with Nokia , Ouch! and Symbian .

While Nokia had a leading role in creating the project Meegan, apparently was never involved in active maintenance, leaving this responsibility to its place in the Linux Foundation. Intel, the other major sponsor of Meegan (always involving your Atom chip, soon hastened to clarify that its support for this project, "not to blink" in light of the recent agreement between Nokia and Microsoft.

But someone much closer to MeeGo does not see a promising future:

Andrew Wafaa is the developer responsible for building the GUI OpenSUSE netbook edition, launched last year as Smeegol and based on the same Meego. But now Wafaa said in his blog that he is convinced that the people behind MeeGo virtually stopped working on the project, and consequently he also left Smeegol.

Wafaa said that directly and indirectly involved in the project Meegan confirmed to him that is making its Netbook UX in maintenance mode and effectively stopping any further development on it. Evidence supporting this claim is the fact that plans for MeeGo 1.2 does not include any new features but only bugfixes.

Posted in VivaLinux! , filed Distros and labeled as Meego , Nokia and Ouch! .

The Qt project had achieved some very important milestones after the acquisition of Trolltech (creators) by Nokia a couple of years. Now it remains to be seen what the relevance of all this after yesterday's announcement of the strategic partnership of the giant Finnish cell phones with Microsoft.

For now also announced that Qt will remain the development framework for Symbian (Nokia says it will continue to use Symbian for "more devices) and applications will continue to develop" critical applications "in Qt for the Symbian platform. And, surprisingly, also encourages developers to "do the same" (citing the 200 million Symbian users worldwide and 150 million Symbian phones that Nokia still expects to sell).

The underlying message is that Nokia has no plans for adapting Qt to Windows APIs Phone 7. What is predictable, if we consider that Microsoft already coprometió to freely distribute your Windows Phone Tools Developer Tools, Visual Studio 2010, Expression, Silverlight and XNA Framework developers to get on the boat "Microkia."

In addition, Nokia also claims that her fiance MeeGo device will still be released this year, which will be compatible with applications developed with Qt and will provide developers with a new product to take into account (?).

One thing is certain: With the current fourth iteration of IOS and the third of Android to come out of the oven, Nokia is also the last chance for Windows to be a lucrative niche in the market for smartphones.

Posted in VivaLinux! , filed in Software and tagged Meegan , Microsoft , Nokia , Programming , Qt , Symbian and Windows .