It's a pretty sad day for Linux enthusiasts and, possibly, KDE developers. I'm sure everyone has heard about Nokia's adoption of Windows Phone 7 and the resulting drop of support for Meego. Well, to put it officially, Meego will ship this year but "not as part of another broad smarpthone platform strategy, but as an opportunity to learn." In other words, Nokia will release its current Meego phone under development and then move on. That's pretty depressing news for the future of QT development. There seems to be little incentive for Nokia to continue supporting QT as part of its R&D which Nokia president Stephen Elop promised to severely slash for Q2.

The ONLY hope that remains alive for Nokia's continuing support of QT is its plan to develop an alternative OS for its tablet strategy. Additionally, Intel released a statement promising continued support of Meego, although I'm dubious how profitable it will be for Intel to continue developing a platform void of other corporate support.

Of course, this is not exactly a new scenario for the open source community and QT will guaranteed survive. However, I have to admit that Nokia's developers have made absolutely incredible progress on QT and really pushed it past GTK+. I think two things are important for QT's long-term survival potentially without any large corporate support:
1) Minimize forks. If Nokia announces its immediate suspension of QT development, the last thing we need is half a dozen forks to dilute open source efforts
2) KDE needs to work off of a QT fork, not develop its own fork. I know that many KDE developers may not agree with me, but I think that this is vital for cross-platform (and also cross-DE) integration.
3) Continue developing the mobile support for QT, including multitouch and QML.
OK, that's three points, but #2 is sortof part of #1.
I'm a cross-platform QT developer, not specifically a KDE developer, so I'm interested in hearing everyone else's views!

If Nokia stops development of Qt it automatically gets released to the community under a BSD license.

From what I've read agreements between Microsoft and Nokia isn't worth the paper it is written considering what I've read of MS's past agreements with mobile hardware manufacturers Like Sendo and HTC are anything to go by.

It is indeed a bad day for QT/KDE. Who is to say that Nokia just keeps QT development to a minimum so that it doesn't get passed to the open source community?

While this thread isn't the worst offender, but most of blog posts are. I'll say this: Stop with the FUD.
Until now I was never upset by how KDE community worked and reacted. But with this decision by Nokia, some of the KDE users "disappointed" me.
I mean, while I'm not completely OK with the Nokias decision, it was the most reasonable decision, given the fact that Symbian is so far behind compared to Android and iOS. And MeeGoo is far from finished.
Yeah they could use Android, like the rest. But then again that would make them just one of the Android phones. On the other hand WP7 is new platform which isn't on so many phones.

And come on, Microsoft really doesn't care about destroying KDE or Qt.
So once again stop with all the "freetarded" FUD, and just wait to see what this will actually change if anything.

Primoz wrote:While this thread isn't the worst offender, but most of blog posts are. I'll say this: Stop with the FUD.
Until now I was never upset by how KDE community worked and reacted. But with this decision by Nokia, some of the KDE users "disappointed" me.
I mean, while I'm not completely OK with the Nokias decision, it was the most reasonable decision, given the fact that Symbian is so far behind compared to Android and iOS. And MeeGoo is far from finished.
Yeah they could use Android, like the rest. But then again that would make them just one of the Android phones. On the other hand WP7 is new platform which isn't on so many phones.

And come on, Microsoft really doesn't care about destroying KDE or Qt.
So once again stop with all the "freetarded" FUD, and just wait to see what this will actually change if anything.

I am definitely not trying to start a FUD. For one thing, I actually quite like Microsoft and use Windows 7 equally much as Linux. I also fully appreciate Nokia's decision as an extremely necessary business move. Meego (and Maemo before it), looked woefully incomplete compared to the competition currently on the market. What I AM interested in discussing is the future of QT, and the impact this is going to have on Linux DEs. The open source community doesn't like to admit it, but corporate-sponsored development, whether it has been from Red Hat, Novell, Canonical or Nokia is absolutely instrumental for the future of Linux. GTK+ is a prime example of a largely open-source project that lacks initiative and has hardly introduced any new features in the past few years. Am I being a pessimist? Maybe. However, as a long-time KDE enthusiast, the fragmentation of Gnome 3.0 due to Ubuntu's decision to not use the Gnome Shell already demonstrated Linux's fragile nature. I know many Linux users will disagree with me, but an overabundance of choice is both Linux's strength and Achilles heel. KDE 4 has been defined by a strong vision and clearly defined long-term goals. In part, this has been because the KDE developers have been able to fucus on developing the DE and not the UI libraries. We need to make sure it stays that way.

Primoz wrote:While this thread isn't the worst offender, but most of blog posts are. I'll say this: Stop with the FUD.
Until now I was never upset by how KDE community worked and reacted. But with this decision by Nokia, some of the KDE users "disappointed" me.
I mean, while I'm not completely OK with the Nokias decision, it was the most reasonable decision, given the fact that Symbian is so far behind compared to Android and iOS. And MeeGoo is far from finished.
Yeah they could use Android, like the rest. But then again that would make them just one of the Android phones. On the other hand WP7 is new platform which isn't on so many phones.

And come on, Microsoft really doesn't care about destroying KDE or Qt.
So once again stop with all the "freetarded" FUD, and just wait to see what this will actually change if anything.

new platform? samsumg lg ?doesn't they use winddows ?

wp7... its not finished ... android is finished (young but with all)

@irrdev: Sorry, the FUD comment wasn't that much directed to you, than to some KDE Planet bloggers, where some of their comments were just that... Also I was a bit annoyed with all the doom-talk and wrote in "affect".

@nowardev: I was referring to the fact that WP7 is currently on less phones than Android. As you said LG, and the list pretty much ends there. Okay not really but still .
And what do you mean by WP7 not being finished? I don't understand.

@primoz

http://windows7intouch.blogspot.com/201 ... one-7.html

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/24/micr ... tethering/

and a lots more *.*

OMG! MS released an incomplete product that lacks basic functionality for the sake of getting the product to market on time??? And to think that I may have actually almost trusted them to only ever release fully-functional products! Sure looks like a bright future for Nokia and Microsoft! /FUD

As for the comments about new platform on not so many phones, WP7 is new compared to Android and iOS, and there are far fewer phones running WP7 than Android. Entering into this arena with a half-finished product is going to make things extremely hard for Microsoft. They probably would have been better off taking the extra couple of months making sure that all of the features worked properly; that way their uptake would not be hampered by a defective product, and their image not tainted by having recently released a product that lacks basic functionality.

---> look at picture of microsoft stocks
and

see ceo of nokia is an microsoft stock holder :S

nowardev wrote:---> look at picture of microsoft stocks
and see ceo of nokia is an microsoft stock holder :S

I don't know regulators would ALLOW Nokia to form a partnership with Microsoft under these circumstances. Yes, compared to the large shareholders, Elop's shares are worth a pittance, but if I was a shareholder of Nokia, I would suspect my ceo of not properly considering Android.

As for Windows Phone 7, my brief experiences with it have been largely negative. However, I have several friends who have it and absolutely love it. It might be worth mentioning, too, that they aren't "techies" and that the seamless UI design is the consumer strong point. I never would have predicted it, but I think Microsoft is getting away with a lack of feature-parity (for now) due to the uniqueness of the UI design. Stock Android, after all, is really a mimic of iOS with widgets. WP 7 actually brings a new
"cool" factor to the market.

nowardev wrote:---> look at picture of microsoft stocks
and

see ceo of nokia is an microsoft stock holder :S

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/14 ... ms_trojan/

Apparently Elop has been selling his MS stock (on hold because of this deal) and intends to sell the rest when the deal closes.
Now whether he actually does or not is another story.

you must focus on :

-why announce something that will take 1-2 years to work well now? saying that you don't want to support symbian anymore?? you will aspect customers will buy 250 000 symbian devices after you have said symbian is fading off ??

-i would developed with microsoft windows 7 phone for nokia and THEN i will announce it. this kind of announcement has made ----> -16% of nokia stocks.

-you choose a system that has done, 0-->20%---->still growing ? (android)
or one that has done 0--->12%--->5% (microsoft phone os 7)

-android is a linux kernel. so i guess it was natural to use it. symbian it's the same

-with android it would have taken less time to develop something that works fine...

-android is known by customers and it's working nice on htc and samsung... and they sell their device well...

after that well,

you can sell stocks with your name and buy others stocks with a fake name...or ...or ... or...there is a lots of way to cover your situations...

the worse thing at all is that he was a microsoft guy. that is the issue..... he was and he is..and he will be always a microsoft guy, with the same point of view...