Goodbye NOKIA and thanks for all the fish
12. Februar 2011 von Uwe Kaminski
Just my personal opinion about the decision of Nokia to support Windows Phone as main mobile platform.
NOKIA’s decision is a big smash into the face of
- all the developers which believed the story about QT as main framework and actively working on applications for MeeGo/Symbian
- the community which was supported over years and which was growing more and more
- Intel and all the other MeeGo partners
- Business partners and shareholders which now have to wait at least one more year until the new platform is ready
- all the NOKIA employers which have to do a 180° turn now
- the whole open source idea @ NOKIA
NOKIA will end up as an hardware partner among others like Samsung and HTC for Microsoft’s OS which may be nice but not relevant for me. This decision comes years to late now. It is the second time a decision which changes everything at NOKIA without releasing a real product. The first time was the decision to do it the open source way.
It’s a very sad day for NOKIA and also for me.
But I don’t will go without a list of things I got from the Maemo community and NOKIA the last years:
- Contact to a great community and awesome people all over the world
- Maemo (and also MeeGo) was helping me to understand open source and the idea behind
- A much better knowledge about GNU Linux
- An awesome device, the N900
- indirectly it helped me to get a new job
- indirectly it helped me to get a c-base member
I’ll track what happens with MeeGo but I’m sure I never will own a NOKIA product again. Open Source is not dead (outside of NOKIA).
7 Reaktionen zu “Goodbye NOKIA and thanks for all the fish”
Hi Uwe,
I am Ben. I have met you during the MeeGo conference.
It is a sad day for us. I can’t believe the management of Nokia is so stupid to make this decision. Just like what you said, Nokia will end up as a hardware partner like Samsung and HTC only. And as they have also cut the R&D engineers, it won’t able to make any cutting edge devices.
However, Qt is not dead. It is a open source project and many developers are using it. And I think they would like to contribute and maintain it. Moreover, Intel and Ubuntu should be interested to engage for further development.
Hope that we will have chance to meet again in other event
[...] personal 2 ct about #Meego and #nokia: http://internettabletblog.de/2011/02/12/goodbye-nokia-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish/ Tags: fresh, [...]
HI Ben,
yes we all had a good time in Dublin. Maybe we will see each other in August inn Berlin at the Desktop Summit?
Regarding QT I don’t see a chance for it to play a role on mobile devices after this announcement.
I’m afraid I share the negative feelings about the future of Qt. Sure, it will remain an important tool in the GNU/Linux based desktop world (as it was before Nokia made it the mobile umbrella-toolkit)… but that’s a niche. Being on the desktop and on millions of phones would have been mass market. That was the bright future for Qt… and for Qt developers. If you concentrate on Qt now, what will you do on 3 years time with these skills? (Except, of course, if by some unexpected turn of fate MeeGo really, really takes without Nokia – which is what I still hope for, no matter how unlikely it may be.)
I admit to sharing your feelings, Uwe… but for now I’m going to wait and see how serious Intel is about MeeGo. There may be some hope yet for open-sourced mobility…
We all feel betrayed. But we must also admit Nokia was in a corner and MeeGo wasn’t ready. I think they could have bet on Maemo, but they killed it already.
Anyway, where else could have they gone? Android? Wait again ?
I understand all the sadness though…this decision was totally against OSS. They’ll still “experiment” with it, but it’s very little after they’ve been experimenting with it from 2005.
[...] Steffen Kahl – Ragow und Umgebung (Ragow/9069) 105. icelaw77`s blog (Döbern/9174) 106. Internettabletblog (Potsdam/9179) 107. Kreckis Blog (Brandenburg/9216) 108. Ich alter Dinosaurier [...]