Russell Beattie

Nokia just announced they've purchased Trolltech, the makers of Qt - the underlying libraries for the KDE desktop and the open source "greenphone". I think it's a pretty bewildering purchase if you ask me.

On one hand, it's nice to see Nokia getting in deeper with Open Source and Linux. I can also see them benefiting from having more software developers in house as they start to add more advanced software and services to their product lines.

On the other hand I don't actually like KDE (I religously use Gnome) and the Greenphone didn't impress me much. Nokia also uses a Gnome-based GUI on their N800/N810 web tablets, which I was hoping to see extend to their other platforms. Now I understand why some people told Miker a week or so ago at a open source mobile meetup that Maemo wasn't going anywhere.

I would love to see Nokia use this as way of moving away from Symbian, which has proven itself incapable of being an attractive platform for developers and completely unknown by consumers, but I doubt this will be the case. One could hope though.

I wonder how much involvement Trolltech had in the development of KHTML, which was the basis for the WebKit libraries, which seems to be the core of every advanced mobile browser? That might be some reasoning as well.

Anyways, I'm sure like many of the recent purchases we've seen lately, that Trolltech will just fade into the borg-like structure of Nokia never to be seen again. It should be interesting what the Slashdotters say about this news.

-Russ