I'm glad that Nokia have decided to do this. I understand that it might be financially motivated, but given that they've made a bet on the Windows platform, it's a nicer move than just mothballing the whole thing and eventually shutting it down.
Google has used it for some client apps (Earth, MusicManager). Skype uses it (though post-MS that seems subject to change). Intel already employs some of the senior Qt people.
I think the most likely resting place will be a non-profit of some sort along the lines of the Mozilla foundation.
Yep, Troll Tech (the company behind Qt before Nokia bought them) was making an annual revenue of about 25M€. I'm supposing this was partly licensing, and partly support and training
With the licensing business gone through move to LGPL licensing and the Digia deal it would at least be hard to make Qt a business on its own again. So the probable acquirers are companies that are building products on Qt, like RIM or maybe some of the big embedded players. Intel would also be a possibility, I imagine.
Embarc.. (oh, whoever owns Delphi right now, hard to even spell) who's been struggling for multiplatform solutions for some time.
Though I'd not bet on it. Their management seems to have made all the wrong decisions in product development in the last 10+ years and has ridden Delphi, a platform which was always way ahead of its time, into irrelevance.
Autodesk - Maya, MotionBuilder, etc. - all based on Qt
Sony uses it, at least the tools I've seen from them.
Probably lots of other big companies do, but somehow avoid or it's too cheap for them to use it. I'm still puzzled how they were able to survive that long...
Would it help Google if they bought it as their own dev tool for Android? Something like Apple's own Xcode? Or are the incompatibilities too great to bother with it?
Someone already ported Qt to android along with Qt Creator integration, all-in-one installer, and a Qt library packaging system for your apps. Appears to be in development still.
Unless there's some compelling reason to prefer Qt Creator over Eclipse, I'm guessing not.
On the other hand, the current Eclipse SDK does have a pretty compelling advantage over Qt Creator: it's already written and working. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
> Or are the incompatibilities too great to bother with it?
Yes. Also Google already has multiple development platforms, including one for Android (two, if you count Java and C++ Android development separately, they do have separate development kits).
That would still require some sort of NDK backend for the Qt toolkit, since X11 is not compatible with the native Android windowing system. I'd imagine that's no small feat.
Well Qt doesn't require X11. Qt's backends are actually VERY flexible, essentially all you need to do is provide it with a 2D drawing surface in most cases.
There is already an Android port of Qt in progress here, with a lot of things (including Qt Quick and QWidgets) already working: http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/
Several apps using Qt have already been published in Google Play.
What are some good examples of successful large framework mergers? I can't think of any off the bat. It all sounds good in theory until you try to look at it in practice. 2 different languages, 2 different ways of doing everything -- graphics, networking, logging, etc. I like Qt and I like Android API but not sure how they two can live side by side without stepping on each other's toes or detracting attention.
qt creator would be a great tool for developing google nacl(native client) applications rather than android I guess. I know there is already some work done for qt to work with nacl apis. http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt_for_Google_Native_Client
Had a friend who saw the warning signs and bailed early enough. Queensland (the state Brisbane is in) recently had it's government shed tens of thousands of workers in a bid to reduce debt. Seems to be a great time to be hiring talent in Brisbane?
I also use it for wkhtmltopdf http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/ , is the only decent solution that works with javascript pages and from almost all languages : python , ruby , php
