[Interest] Semi-OT: Was Nokia net good or bad for Qt?

[Thiago Macieira]

On sexta-feira, 27 de setembro de 2013 13:44:23, Uwe Rathmann wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:13:33 -0400, K. Frank wrote:
> > Did this "detour" (for lack of a better word) end up being helpful?
> 
> Nokia was not interested in the desktop and the previous user base. IMHO
> this had 3 effects:
> 
> a) LGPL
> 
> Good and bad: the business case of selling support licenses is dead
> ( almost all Qt developers are payed  ), what is IMO one of the reasons
> behind the missing resources.

The consulting companies would beg to differ here. I know that Digia, ICS and 
KDAB are collecting money on support, supporting both the open source and 
commercial versions of Qt.

And Digia is making money on selling commercial licenses. I don't know how the 
numbers today compare to the time of the GPL, though.

The reason why we're missing resources is that there's no cash-daddy pouring 
money into Qt, like Nokia was. The Qt development team grew considerably 
during the Nokia time (which is a good thing of that time too), faster than 
the commercial business.

> b) Symbian
> 
> Only bad - nobody was interested beside Nokia - and has been removed
> again with Qt5.

I totally agree. I managed to survive my 3 years inside Nokia without ever a 
single time attempting a Symbian build or even installing their toolchain. I 
wasn't alone :-)

> 
> c) QML
> 
> No migration path from C++/Widgets with the result, that almost all
> existing projects are not interested. With Qt 5.1 QML might have become
> an option for a desktop application - but to be honest I never heard of
> one.

Mind you: Qt 5.1 with the Qt Quick Controls was released 3 months ago.

> The existence of 2 different systems is a problem of itself. The
> development is working on the QML side, while the majority of the user
> base is doing widgets.
> 
> For me as an author of a 3rd party lib it means I have to deal with 2
> different platforms. The opposite of "code once ..." what used to be the
> mantra of Qt in the TrollTech days.

Because the industry has changed. There's no way the C++ widgets as they have 
been designed will work on the new platforms.

We could have completely refactored the widgets and tried to make them work on 
all platforms again. The consequences of that would be:
 1) a much-delayed Qt 5.0
 2) a source-incompatible set of classes ("I have to deal with 2 different 
    platforms")
 3) a LOT of behaviour incompatibility, plus 4 years worth of fixing 
   regressions (remember Qt 3 to 4, anyone?)

And to top it all off, there's no guarantee we could have managed that.

Every year in the Qt Developer Days plenary sessions, the audience asked for 
more bugfixing, fewer new features, and definitely no regressions. We listened. 
So instead of breaking QtWidgets by refactoring it, we kept it as-is, we're 
fixing bugs, and we're introducing a new solution, step by step, so we can 
achieve the "code once" goal again.

Tell me that was wrong.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
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