All About Symbian - News from the Symbian Ecosystem...
Nokia adds LGPL licensing option for Qt 4.5
Published by Rafe Blandford at 15:01 GMT, January 14th 2009
Nokia, in a strategically significant move, has announced that it will add a LGPL 1.4 (Lesser General Public License) open source licensing option for the Qt UI and application framework from the release of Qt 4.5, which is scheduled for March 2009. The new licensing is more permissive as it allows the use of Qt for proprietary commercial development at no cost, thus offering greater flexibility to developers. Read on for more.
Nokia will also be changing Qt's development method to make it more transparent. The source code will be available in a publicly accessible Git repository. Consequently this will make it easier for third parties to contribute directly to the improvement and development of Qt.
Nokia intends to use Qt as the a cross platform (Symbian, Series 40, Maemo and Web [PC]) development framework in its ongoing software and service strategy. Qt is a strategically important asset for Nokia, but it is demonstrating its commitment to open source by opening it up for wider commercial usage.
Nokia will lose some revenues (although commercial licenses of Qt will still be available), but these are likely to be offset by greater community contributions and the de facto benefits of wider adoption of the Qt application framework. With the open sourcing of Symbian and license changes to Qt Nokia clearly feel there are significant business advantages in adopting an open source strategy. The two key software assets and its contributions to other open source projects, such as WebKit, make Nokia a very important player in the open source software space.
"Broader use of Qt by even more leading companies will result in valuable feedback and increased contributions, ensuring that Qt remains the best-in-class, cross-platform UI and application framework. The accelerated development of Qt will allow developers, including Nokia, to deliver better devices and applications, reduce time to market and enable a wider deployment base for their solutions," said Sebastian Nyström, Vice President, Qt Software, Nokia.
"Nokia is making significant contributions to open source communities through ongoing work with Qt, its contribution of Symbian OS and S60 to the Symbian Foundation and open development of the Maemo platform," said Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia. "By moving to LGPL, opening Qt's source code repositories and encouraging more contributions, Qt users will have more of a stake in the development of Qt, which will in turn encourage wider adoption. Nokia will be able to leverage improvements in Qt across S60 on Symbian OS, Maemo and OVI services without rewriting the source code."
The cross platform development environment is a hot area and the move to LGPL further reaffirms Qt's leadership in this space.
Incidentally the news also strengthens KDE's position compared to GNOME in the Linux desktop market. Furthermore the KDE / Qt combination could potentially itself become an important cross platform environment in the desktop world. In general the move will also please the free software movement, from whom there was some uncertainty after Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech, as it moves Qt fully towards the open source ideal.
Here is a video in which Vice President Nokia, Qt Software Sebastian Nyström (see also this entry on his blog) and Trolltech Co-Founder Eirik Chambe-Eng discuss what adding the LGPL means for Qt.
That's one mayor hurdle removed for Qt adoption in the Symbian world. Three questions though:
1) where's the AppStore?
2) wil S40 become open to developers?
3) Who care's about Maemo now the N810 has been abandoned and there's no successor hardware?
Unregistered
N810 has not been abandoned, but production of the wiimax version has stopped. Read a interview lately with a Nokia Boss saying it was still an important area for Nokia and new devices could be expected. They expected 5 generation for it to be profitable(or something like that) and the current is generation 3.
Tzer2
Maemo has not been abandoned, but the N810 wimax edition has stopped (largely due to wimax being a bit of a damp squib). The ordinary N810 is still available.
The successor hardware to the N810 was announced at the Maemo summit last autumn, it will use OMAP3 and various other gubbins. The new operating system version for the new hardware is already available to developers (under the codename Fremantle), and the new hardware itself should be released some time in the second half of 2009.
Whether the new hardware is actually another tablet or not is open to question.
Nokia has insisted on using the word "maemo" instead of "tablet" whenever talking about it, as if they're planning on putting the OS into a different kind of device. I would personally prefer them to do a mini-laptop, as the tablet form factor is far too close to their existing Symbian phones.
Quote:
where's the AppStore?
That's the big question, and arguably the biggest flaw in Symbian right now. If they can vastly improve Download's contents and style, that would be a huge advance for the platform's ecosystem.
Quote:
wil S40 become open to developers?
S40 uses a proprietary Nokia OS, I don't think they'll ever open it up as it's meant for lower-end feature phones. S40 phones run Java though, that's good enough for most S40 users.
svdwal
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tzer2
Maemo has not been abandoned, but the N810 wimax edition has stopped (largely due to wimax being a bit of a damp squib). The ordinary N810 is still available.
Ok, thanks for correcting me.
Quote:
S40 uses a proprietary Nokia OS, I don't think they'll ever open it up as it's meant for lower-end feature phones. S40 phones run Java though, that's good enough for most S40 users.
Qt would me a more interesting proposition if developers could write andsell for S40 too. Qt doesn't run on the iPhone and on Android because it doesn't have a Objective-C or a Java binding. The difference between mobile and desktops UI's is big enough to warrant two UI's to take advantage of the strong points of the platforms. That doesn't leave a lot of places where Qt makes commercial sense. Making S40 available to developers adds a commercial incencitive.
Unregistered
"it doesn't have a Objective-C or a Java binding"
Actually, Qt does have an official Java binding: Jambi.
Tzer2
I don't know of how much significance this is, but some newer S40 phones do have "Download!" icons on their desktops. They're selling non-native Java apps of course, but perhaps Nokia does intend to put proper app stores on Series 40 at some point?
