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My paranoid brain often thought that Microsoft not only acquired their stake in Nokia for Windows phones but also to control some aspects of Qt as it was quickl

My paranoid brain often thought that Microsoft not only acquired their stake in Nokia for Windows phones but also to control some aspects of Qt as it was quickly unloaded from Nokia after Microsoft entered the picture. A sort of power play which we all saw later on with Xamarin without the feel-good outcome that Xamarin eventually had. Qt Creator is a joy to work with for open source software in my opinion for even just non-Qt projects. Back then I was using it on my BSD desktop before switching to XCode for vanilla C++ projects. Anyhow, it was extremely portable I could code with MinGW on Windows and then move the same project to BSD and then move it into XCode with minor changes. I would imagine Nokia at that time would seem extremely unique to Microsoft for just Qt alone. Just some food for thought...I still have Qt built ANGLE libs in my GH repo I think. Yeah, it was also an OpenGL ES 2 emulator that ran on DirectX which you could optionally run Qt Creator on top of and I remember Nokia's name was all over it. It was possible to do cross-platform Windows and Android code this way with just a JNI wrapper. It was a hot mess and I loved it! Here are a couple links that back up this strange tale: https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_5_on_Windows_ANGLE_and_OpenGL https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_5_on_Windows_ANGLE_and_OpenGL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)

rdtsc 9y ago
I would imagine in a large enough acquisition like that Qt was probably at the bottom and wasn't even noticed much. For example The Qt company makes about $30M in revenue and Microsoft spent about $7B for the acquisition. That's less than 1% of the $7B.
pjmlp 9y ago
Even in 2017, with several uses across Symbian, Blackberry, Ubuntu and Jolla SDKs, Qt is lacking in regards to mobile OS API support. Unless one is doing GUI apps required without integration with OS APIs or their native UIs, replicating everything in QML (C++ widgets are not supported) and writting JNI and Objective-C++ wrappers isn't that much fun. Xamarin gets more love from app developers, because even before Microsoft's acquisition they had a whole set of teams dedicated to doing nothing else other than achieving parity with iOS and Android native APIs.
coldtea 9y ago
>I would imagine Nokia at that time would seem extremely unique to Microsoft for just Qt alone. At the level Microsoft plays, Qt is insignificant.
5trokerac3 9y ago
> I would imagine in a large enough acquisition like that Qt was probably at the bottom and wasn't even noticed much. Qt was the UI toolkit for the _Meego_ OS, which Nokia was developing at a time where there was still very much room for a third mobile OS. wolfspider's paranoia has some truth behind it. When MS invested in Nokia and a "former" MS exec became CEO, his first action was to completely kill Meego and announce that Nokia would exclusively make Windows phones, even though Meego was gathering steam. Much of the company walked out of the address that he announced it at.

rdtsc 9y ago

I would imagine in a large enough acquisition like that Qt was probably at the bottom and wasn't even noticed much. For example The Qt company makes about $30M in revenue and Microsoft spent about $7B for the acquisition. That's less than 1% of the $7B.

pjmlp 9y ago

Even in 2017, with several uses across Symbian, Blackberry, Ubuntu and Jolla SDKs, Qt is lacking in regards to mobile OS API support. Unless one is doing GUI apps required without integration with OS APIs or their native UIs, replicating everything in QML (C++ widgets are not supported) and writting JNI and Objective-C++ wrappers isn't that much fun. Xamarin gets more love from app developers, because even before Microsoft's acquisition they had a whole set of teams dedicated to doing nothing else other than achieving parity with iOS and Android native APIs.

coldtea 9y ago

>I would imagine Nokia at that time would seem extremely unique to Microsoft for just Qt alone. At the level Microsoft plays, Qt is insignificant.

5trokerac3 9y ago

> I would imagine in a large enough acquisition like that Qt was probably at the bottom and wasn't even noticed much. Qt was the UI toolkit for the _Meego_ OS, which Nokia was developing at a time where there was still very much room for a third mobile OS. wolfspider's paranoia has some truth behind it. When MS invested in Nokia and a "former" MS exec became CEO, his first action was to completely kill Meego and announce that Nokia would exclusively make Windows phones, even though Meego was gathering steam. Much of the company walked out of the address that he announced it at.