Qt and Qtopia have been standards in the embedded Linux market for some time. I remember running it on my Sharp Zaurus many years ago. In a sense, they inherited years more Linux experience in the embedded scene with this purchase.
From the press release:
"Trolltech and Nokia share the goal of accelerating the adoption of Trolltech's Qt based technology in the commercial market and in the open source community," said Haavard Nord, CEO and founder of Trolltech. Eirik Chambe-Eng, Chief Troll and co-founder of Trolltech continues "We are thrilled to join forces with Nokia. The company's innovative culture and resources will give our employees new and exciting possibilities and fulfill our vision of "Qt everywhere"."What does that mean to the Internet Tablets? Nothing yet. Maemo is doing so well that it will likely stay and adopt Qt technologies in the future. It's likely that some maemo accomplishments will make their way into Qt as well. Regardless of what happens: Nokia's embracing Linux like never before.
2 comments:
I'm not sure if this is really good news. I dont know how to put this, but part of "The Right Thing" about Maemo is the communities it depends upon. Free software doesn't necessarily need to be community driven, but it makes things feel better.
Now Nokia seems to be having a hard time with "the community" as such. They're improving, yes, but every now and then you feel they'd rather do Maemo without people from the outside world interfering. They cant do it the way it is, because it depends on so many community driven projects.
Qt isn't community driven. Qt is controlled by a company, and this company will be Nokia in the future. So although it seems Nokia's commitment to the GNU/Linux world is stronger than ever, this move also indicates they want to gain control rather than work with the community. I don't know if I'm all too excited about this.
@anon...
I think that the main reason Nokia is going after Trolltech/QT/(Maybe KDE) can be summarized in one word... Android. With Google consolidating a wide consortium, and Apple powering on OS X, Nokia sees itself as needing to have somehing in its own court, hence the Trolltech acquisition. It shall be interesting to see how it all plays out--esp. for me, on the Maemo front--since it's GTK+ based, not QT/KDE-based..
-Jon
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