Qt Brisbane Developers Bid Farewell

While many Qt developers are rejoicing today over the long awaited Qt 5.0 beta release, Nokia's Qt Brisbane office was officially shutdown today and many of these Qt experts are now without jobs.

Lorn Potter of the now-dead Nokia Qt Brisbane office wrote an email to the Qt development list. This shutting down comes a few weeks after word got out the office would be shutdown and then Nokia sold Qt to Digia.

The Nokia Brisbane office was responsible for Qt Declarative, Location, Multimedia, Systems/Sensors, and QA. Lars Knoll has already said Nokia shutting down this office is really sad and that its already harmed the Qt 5.0 release. These developers can continue contributing to the Qt Project if they wish, but they are no longer employed by Nokia/Digia and many of them have yet to find employment elsewhere.

Below's the full message from Potter that's worth reading about Qt Brisbane.

Hi Qtland,

Brisbane's last day was effectively yesterday, as all our machines got wiped last night. Happy to say some of us are able and willing continue our roles in the qt-project. Thanks for those people (Thiago!) that put the open governance into place.

I would say most of the talented engineers in Brisbane are still looking for jobs. (hint, hint, hint)

Declarative, location, multimedia, systems/sensors and QA were all developed in Brisbane.

It's been a great run for me at Trolltech and then Nokia. I first started with Trolltech in 2003 as Qtopia Community Liaison, and finished with Nokia as Senior Software Engineer developing QSensorGestures and its recognizers.

Going through all the accumulated junk in the office, all the Trolltech prototypes, phones and whatnot, and looking back, I am very proud to say I was a part of Trolltech and Qtopia development, and also of Nokia, the most awesome N9 and Symbian^3. Our work back then was on quite a few more varied devices than it was the last few years.

With only a handful of engineers, we released the first open source phone - the Greenphone (minus a binary blob or two)!

I hope and trust the spirit of Trolltech's values will continue to live within the qt-project and the companies that use it.

As the official last day we have possession of our key cards, in true Aussie style, most of our last tasks are having a BBQ, followed by a pub crawl downtown Brisbane.