Dark clounds on the horizon for Qt?

[GreyGeek]

Trolltech, the creator of Qt, the API used to create KDE and the powerful CROSSPLATFORM C++ development tool, was bought out by Nokia a year or so ago.

Now comes the news that the Nokia CEO is being dumped, will immediately lose his board seat and is being replaced by Stephen Elop, former president of Microsoft's business software group!

"Nokia has traditionally been strong in hardware, but has been found wanting in software," said Ben Wood, director of research at CCS Insight.

Elop could be the man to change that, according to Wood: "Kallasvuo is a very bright guy, but he has a law degree. Now the guy who will head up the business has a computer science degree. He will bring software expertise to the business."

I suspect that more and more of the future additions to the Qt technology will disappear behind the LGPL binary and Nokia proprietary licenses and less and less of it will get added to the GPL version. The first thing to suffer, I would wager, will be the QtCreator itself. On the Linux desktop it blows Mono away, and on the Microsoft desktop it equals MSVS and exceeds MSVS when it comes to integration with Qt.

Will he truly work on behalf of Nokia's interests or is he Darth Elop, working behind the scenes for his Lord and Master?

[kjjjjshab]

Re: Dark clounds on the horizon for Qt?

My husband told me that GreyGeek would be on top of this. He just read it in the paper. The wife

[GreyGeek]

Re: Dark clounds on the horizon for Qt?

My nearly 5 year old grandson is coming soon and we are going to the zoo, so I don't have much time right now to elaborate on what may happen when a company hires a Microsoft manager.

Microsoft sued Google BECAUSE it hired away one of its key employees. No concern about Elop?

Anyone remember VA Research? "VA Research was founded in November 1993. It built and sold personal computer systems with the Linux operating system installe. At the time they started operations, they were one of the first computer vendors to offer Linux as a pre-installed operating system. During its initial years of operation, the business was profitable and grew quickly, with over $100 million in sales and a 10-percent profit margin in 1998. It was the largest vendor of pre-installed Linux computers, having approximately 20 percent of the Linux hardware market."

It became VA Linux Systems, then VA Software, and then SourceForge, Inc. Within the last year it became known as GeekNet. During these morphisms it hired Microsoft employees. Now it has a different mind set: As we get ready for the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco later this month, Microsoft asked us to pull some statistics around how Windows plays in the broader Open Source ecosystem.

Microsoft funded the first OSBC. At the second OSBC conference Brad Smith was the keynote speaker. He was invited by Matt Asay:
"I asked Brad to speak because I figured it was the shortest path to getting clarity from Microsoft vis-a-vis open source and the nettlesome legal issues that have plagued Microsoft's relationship with open source."

Apparently, MS employees acting as moles isn't new.