Comments on: Back from Gran Canaria

By: See you at DebConf9 « root’ing the net

See you at DebConf9 « root’ing the net — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:01:27 +0000

[...] tomorrow, as this will be my first time at a big community event and it really looks like this kind of things are really interesting and a great opportunity to get in touch with latest developments, [...]

By: Chani

Chani — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:12:39 +0000

the womens’ talks were on the KDE track! ;)
actually, I don’t know the relative numbers for the different tracks. I know we had at least three. yes, I hope we have more than this someday.
I meant to give a talk on plasma, but the call for proposals came at an awkward time for me.

also, the “they’re using qt because they bought it” idea sounds backwards to me. they bought it because they wanted to use it. :)

By: LinuxCertif

LinuxCertif — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:17:56 +0000

Joe is just making noise…

They must have some good reasons to drop everything they have done with GTK+. Performance and productivity certainly come to mind. The work on Freemantle has also been unnecessarily painful, this has certainly put pressure on Nokia to drop GTK+.

We cannot exclude the political aspect of this choice. If they did not own Qt, they would probably have switched to Java.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:50:54 +0000

Joe, can you elaborate why you think that gtk is technically superior compared to Qt? Usually people claim it is the other way round.

By: Monkey

Monkey — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:05:11 +0000

@ Joe Buck: google “Imendio”. They don’t need to fully control Gtk to use it as they like. If they wanted, they’d have a Gtk shop independent of Redhat and Novel, yet ten times more productive than current Gtk maintainers and contributors. It’s not about control, it’s something different.

By: Mathias

Mathias — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:00:58 +0000

You also have to consider things like Nokia’s app store at OVI. To be useful this store must work for all Nokia devices I guess: Symbian phones, Maemo web tablets, … Such an app store won’t work, if 3rd party developers have to support completely different toolkits for different platforms. Telling that only Qt is needed to support phones and webtablets makes a much better business story. Actually this Qt thing even gives Nokia a chance to let their OVI store conquer Android phones and the iPhone. I’d love it to earn money with my competition’s devices.

By: Michael Schurter (schmichael)

Michael Schurter (schmichael) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:29:56 +0000

Open Source Bridge[1] was not only created by 2 women, but, if I remember the stat correctly, 1/3 of the presenters were women.

Selena (@selenamarie) and Audrey (@spinnerin) might be good people to ask about that point. :-)

[1] http://opensourcebridge.org/

By: Joe Buck

Joe Buck — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:58:48 +0000

My take on the Maemo decision is that Nokia controls Qt, they don’t control Gtk+, so they figure that they can do whatever it takes to make Qt work well, while for Gtk+ they have less control. Under those circumstances, all things being equal, I’m not surprised to see them transitioning.

Sometimes companies will throw out superior outside technology for inferior inside technology. Microsoft does it all the time when they acquire companies, the first thing they do is throw out everything that stinks of Linux or BSD.