Nokia boosts Qt commitment, changes Symbian strategy | Hacker News Reader

Nokia boosts Qt commitment, changes Symbian strategy

arstechnica.com

22 pointsrnicholson12 comments

If you're interested in developing Qt mobile apps, there's the $10M app challenge for North America at http://www.callingallinnovators.com/10m/

Another week, another software strategy at Nokia. :-)

I would have to disagree. Qt has been written on the wall for the past few years ever since Trolltech was acquired.

Yup... just writing on the wall (and little else) for a long time now. Now that's a fast turnaround time for a strategic acquisition! Oh, and by the way, a final goodbye to Symbian. Surprise! :-)

Nokia's software division will manage to drown Qt, too.

Thanks for the LGPL license option Nokia. It's made Qt an available option for my development work. Any chance you'd go the extra mile and add a license exception to allow static linking?

You can statically link if you provide all your objects. You can also release your source or just license the commercial Qt.

What's the advantage of static linking?

The QT libraries are gigantic -- easily as big as the JVM, but unlike the JVM you aren't going to need most of what is there, so your programs will take up a lot less space if you statically link them.

This won't matter if you ship 'em on DVD, but it makes a lot of difference if you provide downloads over the internet.

On Mac:

  QtCore    -  5.7 MB
  QtGui     - 24.4 MB
  QtNetwork -  2.6 MB
  QtSql     -  0.5 MB

Not so gigantic by today's standards: 33.2 MB, 12 MB zipped.

For comparison, MacRuby.framework takes 51 MB, 17.3 zipped.

PS But, of course, it would be nice to have a static linking-friendly [free of charge] license.

Do'h, I checked the size some months ago - but I must have had them compiled in debug mode. Still 30 MB is quite large to download over an average commercial internet link.

A good example of the power of competition at work. They wouldn't have done this if they face no completion from other OSes.

In the end, we customers are the real winners! :)

I first heard of this when Nokia had well over 50% of the market. It's announced now, but known for a long time.

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