Nokia sells off remaining Qt assets
August 21, 2012 —
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“I think [Qt] had a very narrow but loyal following because, if you look at who uses those tools, those are C++ programmers. Those are really hardcore programmers,” he said.
But that world doesn't exactly connect with the world where Nokia hoped to use Qt: mobile platforms. “I don't think they have a future, in terms of cross-platform mobile interface,” said Gualtieri. “Adobe tried that with Flash, and lost. The mobile landscape is just too rough and tumble right now. So, I think they just go back to serving their core constituency, which is embedded software that needs a user interface, and C++ programmers.”
This movement away from Nokia will also have another consequence for the Qt community: It will delay the release of Qt 5. The beta of that new version was to be released in July, but has yet to arrive.
Mark Summerfield, director of Qtrac (a software consultancy) and author of numerous programming books, said that Qt 5 was already on the wrong path, and that its delay isn't heartbreaking. “I think there are some open questions,” he said.
“I think my biggest concern is that in Qt 4, you could program purely in C++. In Qt 5, you have to do a mixture of C++ and JavaScript or QML. I think the GTK+ people took a much better approach because what they provided was an introspection API, so you could easily write bindings to any language you like, rather than prescribing JavaScript.
“With Qt 5, you're being locked into C++ and JavaScript,” he added. “I find that sad because I really dislike JavaScript. I like that functions are first-class objects, but there's so much I don't like about it. I don't want to be forced to use it.”
Summerfield also expected that Nokia's getting cozy with Microsoft has also enticed it to divest itself of the cross-platform framework, which Microsoft would have no interest in, thanks to Windows.
Nokia and Trolltech
In January of 2008, Nokia entered into the Qt world by purchasing Trolltech, a company built specifically to support and advance Qt. In 2001, Trolltech began working on a mobile platform known as Qtopia, and it was this work that enticed Nokia to purchase the company and its assets in 2008 for US$150 million.
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