Qt's Lars Knoll: "It's Really Sad To See This Happen"

Lars Knoll, the current Qt Chief Architect at Nokia and responsible for leading the Qt 5.0 development, has commented on the shutting down of Nokia's Qt Australia office.

Word leaked two days ago that Nokia would be shutting down their Qt Brisbane office in August, which holds the responsibility of developing and maintaining several Qt components -- including Qt Quick and other important pieces to this tool-kit they acquired from Trolltech. The shutting down of this office goes with the very likely plans that they are selling off Qt.

There's been a lot of negative words towards Nokia -- besides everything else in past months after falling jumping in bed with Microsoft -- with this move to effectively abandon Qt and the fate being uncertain. One can only hope many of these important Qt developers will find employment elsewhere and can continue contributing to upstream Qt.

Not many are happy about Nokia's actions surrounding Qt, the open-source toolkit from Norway.

Lars Knoll, who has worked on Qt going back to 2000 when he joined Trolltech and worked his way up to being the Qt Chief Architect at Nokia, has publicly commented on Nokia's Brisbane office closing. Below is Knoll's message from the Qt Project mailing list.

I talked a bit with the team in Brisbane this morning. Obviously the mood there is somewhat grim.

Talking for me, it's really sad to see this happen. There are a lot of bright engineers working in that office and I have been working with many of them for quite some time now. I really hope that everybody will find a new job soon, and that most of the people will actually stay connected to the Qt ecosystem and Qt project in some form or another.

For Qt as a product, it is now really important to remember that we do have the Qt project and a live and active community around it. This might make some things a bit more difficult in the short term, but we will find ways to deal with this and to continue to move Qt forward.

I'll try to keep this list posted and informed as good as I can.

Lars