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Re: WTF
by psychotron on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @05:46
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Zack, I have a lot of respect for you (from reading your blogs), but you don't honestly believe what you write here, do you? At least I'm very concerned about all this. When the Nokia accountants decided that e.g. supporting KDE developers is not efficent for reaching there business goals how much say will "Lars, Matthias and Warwick" have? None, probably. And what interest can a company like Nokia have to support an open source desktop? None, probably. This is best illustrated by the Bochum case: Nokia make a profit of over 7 billion Euro, an increase of 67% and they close the factory because of - inefficiency: wtf?!
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Re: WTF
by Richard Van Den Boom on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @06:01
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I think Nokia has all the reasons to continue working with KDE for the exact same reason it was interesting for TrollTech to do so : a toolkit like Qt is a rather complex thing to create and to have a complete desktop built on it and providing enormous feedback on almost every usage you can imagine, with quite a lot of users, and at the same time not being directly usable by the competition, is really an enormous advantage. I don't see any reason why Nokia would phase this out as long as they are interested in Qt technology.
I don't think there is any reason to panic here : there's very little chance that Qt could be lost to the open source cause, and if everything goes wrong (and there's no reason to think it will, open source lives well within Sun, for instance), I'm pretty sure many TT guys will leave and make take over the BSD Qt to create another company with the same goals TT had.
So since there should be nothing to be afraid of as far as KDE is concerned, why just not wish good luck to TT and hope they'll be able to add even more goodness in it, using the input of ressources Nokia will provide?
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Re: WTF
by NabLa on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @06:20
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If TT goes evil and closes the QT source somehow, that'll be a massive pity. That said, as long as QT is GPL it can (and will if the need arises) be forked.
It has happened before.
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Re: WTF
by psychotron on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @06:23
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Well, the difference I see here is that Trolltech developed a general purpose framework to be used for all kinds of applications. And for this having KDE as a widely spread testing platform covering all kinds of usage cases is surely a good thing for the company. BUT Nokia has probably no interest in that. I can't imagine they now want to enter the business of selling widget toolkits. IMO they bought Trolltech primaily to develop their own restricted set of applications and for this I think they don't need such a lot of testing as provided by KDE. Of course they will take it as long as they get it for free. But will they support KDE developers? Will they react on development wishes by the KDE community? Maybe they do it now, in order to avoid bad press. But mayby they will silently cease the support for KDE ... I just find it hard to believe that Nokia activly supports free software, as TT did.
(Note: I'm not talking about the licensing issues here, this should be fairly save due to GPL and Free-Qt-Foundation. I'm more concerned about the other support KDE got from TT)
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Re: WTF
by D Kite on Tuesday 29/Jan/2008, @08:35
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You mean that Nokia is now in the desktop business?
Seriously?
Nokia is phones with alot of traction. Phones are getting bigger and more capable. Trolltech is desktops, ie. a library for building apps with some traction, KDE being an obvious benefit to them. They moved into portables and phones with little traction.
How does KDE as desktop tie into Nokia as phones?
How the phone market works here is that you run what you get from the store. No changes, no changing to version 4.1 to see how it works. If KDE has any place here it's as free labour for the phone manufacturers and network owners.
In other words, Trolltech/Nokia will probably continue to provide a seriously good library, but what KDE needs will get back to how it always was, KDE writes. I have had serious doubts about the viability of the Trolltech takeover of major maintenance intensive sections of the KDE desktop that we have seen in the last while (QPrinter, Webkit, #'s of lead developers on payroll, to name a few).
Derek
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Re: WTF
by Segedunum on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @06:49
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"When the Nokia accountants decided that e.g. supporting KDE developers is not efficent for reaching there business goals"
Politics inevitably comes into it, it alwas does, but the fact is that Nokia wouldn't have bothered with this if they weren't going to make Trolltech their development centre, effectively. It would be a bad idea to chop that. Additionally, it is self-sustaining.
"This is best illustrated by the Bochum case: Nokia make a profit of over 7 billion Euro, an increase of 67% and they close the factory because of - inefficiency: wtf?!"
Bochum was a mistake, produced little and shows what can happen when subsidies are involved.
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Re: WTF
by Janne on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @11:43
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"This is best illustrated by the Bochum case: Nokia make a profit of over 7 billion Euro, an increase of 67% and they close the factory because of - inefficiency: wtf?!"
Are you of the school of thought who thinks that "if company makes even one euro in profit, they must NOT try to make their operations more efficient in any shape or form"?.
Fact of the matter is that comparing expenses to production, Bochum was an albatross around Nokia's neck. IIRC, Bochum represented about 24% of Nokia's expenses, while representing only 6% of production. Bochumians should be grateful for the fact that Nokia pumped millions of euros to the local economy for years. That's more than German cell-phone-manufacturers have done (which moved out of Germany long ago).
Few years ago Fujitsu-Siemens shut down a proditable computer-plant in Finland and moved production to Germany. For some reason Germans never opposed that move...
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Re: WTF
by psychotron on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @15:14
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It's not _that_ they did it, it's _how_ they did it. Sure, the can make as much money as they like, I couldn't care less. And the numbers you name a company surely can't accept forever. But they didn't seem to even try to make them better by talking to the employees and maybe find a compromise. If that didn't work out, they still could move the production. However the employees got the news from the press! Additionally they not only pumped millions of euros to the local economy, but also got subsidies from the government... With the 7 billion I just wanted to note that Nokia can very well afford to keep certain ethical standards while still making _a lot_ of profit, but they just didn't care.
And hey, this is not a Finland vs. Germany thing, at least from my side. No need to feel attacked ;) It wouldn't be any better if that were a german company!
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Re: WTF
by Janne on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @23:20
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"It's not _that_ they did it, it's _how_ they did it."
Well, how did they do it?
"But they didn't seem to even try to make them better by talking to the employees and maybe find a compromise"
Reality-check: Bochum is an old television-factory. years ago televisions became unprofitable and Nokia exited the business. They found a compromise back then: they started building phones in the factory. Isn't THAT a "compromise"? Nokia gave the factory YEARS of extra life, while pumping millions to the local economy.
"Additionally they not only pumped millions of euros to the local economy, but also got subsidies from the government."
And I bet they paid a lot more back than what they received from the government. And why are those subsidies an issue? They gave those subsisies on the condition that Nokia will operate the factory for X years. X years has now passed, and they are closing the factory. And the problem is.... what?
"With the 7 billion I just wanted to note that Nokia can very well afford to keep certain ethical standards while still making _a lot_ of profit, but they just didn't care."
What "ethical standards"? Is is "more ethical" to operate a factory in Germany than it is to operate one in Romania?
"It wouldn't be any better if that were a german company!"
It just happens that when German companies pulled the plug on cell-phone manufacturing in Germany, no-one in Germany said a word. What should we do if/when Porsche decides to pull the plug on Porsche-manufacturing in Finland, and move that production to Germany... Will there be demonstrations in Germany then? But hey, I guess that would be "ethical"?
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Re: WTF
by dirks on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @05:52
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I rather believe that Trolltech got the biggest chunk of its high profile because of its licensing. I don't say anything against the developer team - they may be the best of the word but that's not decisive. The licensing is! We all know that KDE would not be based on Qt without the free lecense being there.
Most likely Nokia, even being in control now, cannot change anything about the licensing of the existing versions - but they can do it for future versions! So, it's possible that really nothing changes for the developing team of Trolltech. A little licensing policy change is all that's needed. I cannot imagine a reason for Nokia to spend money on something like this UNLESS it provides them with a way to handicap competitors.
I'm seriously worried!
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Re: WTF
by Richard Van Den Boom on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @06:04
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If licensing was an issue, I'm not sure Nokia would have left TT switch to GPL3 one week before the buyout annoucement.
You're aware, of course, that this type of buyout takes months of discussion, and it's usually not a good idea to cross your buyer?
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Re: WTF
by doesn't matter on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @06:18
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Why the would they care about the license? They could change it to whatever they want with the next version.
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Re: WTF
by Mithrandir on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @07:04
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Yeah, they can change but once Qt is GPLv3 it can not be revoked and that version can be forked by others.
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Re: WTF
by Ben on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @07:05
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Even ignoreing the poison pill, this verson is GPLv3 and that can't be revoked
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Re: WTF
by André on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @07:09
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Because by terms of the agreement with the Free-Qt-Foundation, the latter can basically throw the whole codebase on the street for everybody to use as they see fit under a BSD-style licence. You'd risk throwing away a rather large portion of Trolltech's capital in the form of intellectual property.
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Re: WTF
by Sage on Monday 28/Jan/2008, @14:13
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"I'm not sure whether you are in a position to make demands."
I'm not demanding anything. You made what I believe to be a very incorrect statement, namely, that nothing has changed. My point was that Nokia has control and can fire the engineers you are speaking about if it chooses. Maybe Nokia won't but my point is the entire business model has changed.
If we are lucky, Nokia will treat Qt as a services business and make revenues through support and charging for modifications, rather than on license fees, and keep all the KDE developers. But that is Nokia's choice and, as has been noted, they are a global company focused on the bottom line.
Consider for example: did SuSE undergo changes after being acquired by Novell (recall we where told, no significant changes would be made)? Would SuSE have entered into a patent agreement with Microsoft? Relegated KDE to the backburner? Open-sourced YaST?
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Re: WTF
by lpotter on Tuesday 29/Jan/2008, @11:05
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"My point was that Nokia has control and can fire the engineers you are speaking about if it chooses. Maybe Nokia won't but my point is the entire business model has changed."
Why the heck would they do that? Trolltech are the experts in Qt technology. Nokia wants to help grow that technology. To fire the engineers would mean a huge brain drain. They would have to spend millions to train other engineers.
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