What is the future of Qt?

This is a sad story... Qt was gaining huge momentum under Nokia's acquisition. QML, their new technology for mobile interfaces was just pure joy to use. The platform was moving fast, and it seemed that nothing was impossible, including ports of Qt to Android or iOS.<p>Now, it just seems that it's slowly going to die.<p>As an enthusiastic Qt / QML developer, I'm sad...

The way I read it is, they will maintain Qt to maintain the past ... but not to build their future<p>which I think is bad for anyone who wanted to invest in Qt, we all want to develop for platform of the future not the past

This seems to support my hunch that far from planning to bet irrevocably on WinPho, Nokia is actually trying to keep its options open: pick up a sweet deal to be Microsoft's premium partner in smartphones for a couple of years, use that time to shuck off Symbian, keep MeeGo alive as a tablet OS. Then after that couple of years, when the MS smartphone exclusive expires, take a fresh look around and decide whether to go with one or more of WinPho, Android, MeeGo or whatever may be around at that point. Doesn't seem like a self-evidently terrible strategy, though there's an obvious risk that WinPho will continue to founder and that Nokia won't have the time or money or brand loyalty to tough it out through another couple of years of failure in smartphones.

It's sad, but not unexpected, to see Qt in trouble. Qt is an amazing development environment, and I was getting rather psyched for the prospect of being able to use it to develop for phones, tablets, netbooks, and the desktop. I only hope that if Nokia is done with it, they spin it off or drop it completely (thus activating the FreeQt agreement) rather than defunding it so they maintain control but starve it to death.<p>However, spinning it off (as some are suggesting in the comment thread) has major difficulties. In particular, since buying Trolltech, Nokia has LGPLed Qt. That seems to me to drastically change the situation for prospective commercial licensing, as companies can ship commercial, proprietary products with Qt without paying licensing fees. How would Trolltech 2.0 make money? Sure, there would be a number of companies that still pay the commercial licensing fee, particularly for embedded systems or for support, but would there be enough to continue funding Qt development?

Keith Rusler, from comments section of the article: "I have to say, Nokia made a bad decision jumping to WP7 knowing that Qt wouldn’t be on it. Now that Nokia did this, they basically went from Qt “Code once, run everywhere” to “Code once, run nowhere”."<p>Nokia needs to sell Trolltech <i>NOW</i>. The <i>apparent</i> conflict of interest is too great <i>regardless</i> of what the <i>real</i> conflict of interest might be.<p>And I, like most Qt programmers, don't know what the real level of conflict-of-interest level is. But if I've learned one thing in the corporate world, it's that appearances matter. The appearance that Nokia wants to kill Qt is enough to screw-up a <i>lot</i> of decisions.<p><i>Otherwise</i>, KDE should <i>take steps</i> to force an Apache release of QT source. Better now than later. See: <a href="http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p...</a>

The big change for Nokia is not the adoption of WP7 as an OS,it is the adoption of .NET as the development platform of choice - not to mention that Nokia's Symbian emulators already used Windows as the development platform. In .NET Nokia is adopting a development platform which provides tools and standards for integrating handsets, slates, and desktops into the back office and cloud while reducing issues of fragmentation. While Qt held that promise, it was a long way from the maturity (10+ years) that .NET provides.<p>Adoption of .NET will still allow C++ development for people with those skills and inclinations while not adding any more complexity than exists. More importantly .NET will allow more flexibility going forward - even reusing existing VB code or writing new code in F# or IronPython. Qt was not the future for mobile app development because of the relatively high barrier to entry imposed by C++ for casual app developers and enterprise IT departments.

Nokia will drop QT like a rock if they'll run out of money. Say what you want but Nokia is NOT a software company.

One of Nokia's problems has been lack of focus. I am a huge fan of Qt so I hate to say it, but keeping Qt, MeeGo, and especially Symbian alive (even with reduced investment) makes it sound like this problem has only gotten worse now that WP7 is thrown in the mix.

Actually great new - but the should support the Android-Port of Qt. This is very important - make it easy for Qt developers to stick their head into other revenue sources.