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Comment by eliben | Hacker News Reader

IMHO Nokia has really managed to alienate developers with their treatment of Qt, and their dumping of Meego in favor of MS. This may cause deep repercussions in the long run.

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Having been heavily into Qt before Nokia, I see this very differently. Nokia had no idea what they were doing with Qt and the Mobilin/Maemo/Meego and now Tizen projects were a farce from start to finish. I'm sure as strategies they looked good in Power Point, but they clearly had no clue how to turn them/it into a credible consumer OS. They very much remind me of the bumbling, bullet point oriented aimlesness of the failed OS projects of the 90s - Taligent, Pink, Cairo, etc.

However, now Qt is in the hands of a company that does seem to understand the technology and has a realistic and executable business plan. That's a good thing.

This

You get a credible consumer OS by SHIPPING.

Nokia lacked focus. Just note the Maemo/Meego rewrite. This is like MS saying they're merging Windows with ReactOS and delaying Windows 7 for 3 years

Thanks for your last sentence, i will quote you in the future when describing the Maemo/Meego debacle.

Nokia reminds me of the last days of Sun - so much mismanagement.

Have you ever used a meego device? The N9 is a solid phone, and at time of release Harmattan was far better than the Android offering. What makes you say "they had no clue how to turn it into a credible consumer OS"? That seems to be exactly what they did.

It took them far too long to do it, though. They didn't focus on it, and they had at least three public hardware revisions before they even tried to tack a phone onto the platform. In order to make it credible, they needed to put a lot more weight behind it.

They could have beaten Android by 3 years, but didn't because they were organisationally incapable of doing so.

I'm not disagreeing it took them too long and they did it in a ridiculous way, having already made the MS deal, but I don't understand how you can still say it's "not credible". Go use it.

Credibility is affected by more than the OS itself. I say this as an N900 owner.

I think they were doing fine until they got joined up with Intel. Drove the nice Maemo stuff to the ditch with the failed attempt to merge it with Moblin (-> Meego).

Intel and Microsoft... good partners - but only with each other :)

I don't understand this unthankfulness, didn't Nokia relax the license to LGPL and employ, i.e. pay quite some people during their 4 years? Also now it looks as if they act responsibly, no hire fire mentality at all.

I am not sure since Nokia is no longer involved what-so-ever with Qt.

The hate was aimed at Nokia (their management and Elop especially), not the nokia Qt devs themselves as far as I can see.

Yes, sure at Nokia. This is hardly a reason to hate Qt.

We use QT extensively and I don't agree that this will cause deep repercussions. Everyone I speak to within the community is fine with QT itself

Sure, my comment was about Nokia, not Qt. I love Qt, and will keep using it whenever the opportunity arises. Overall, I'm happy about this development because I really care about Qt, and I care very little about Nokia (for me they're that company that makes nice $80 dumb phones for my grandpa to use. But there are tons of companies like that...)

QT = QuickTime

QT = "cute"

The "cute" toolkit by trolltech is typically spelled Qt or qt

QT usually refers to apple's QuickTime.

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