In what seems now a long time ago, I wrote the following about Qt and Nokia.

Early last year, Nokia acquired Trolltech for $153M, and there was much worry about Qt, the great GUI toolkit. The fear was Nokia would focus only on mobile devices, and cut off Qt’s open source version. In an incredibly smart move (and I have to say one I didn’t see coming), Nokia just announced it’s making Qt available under LGPL.

Think about how this would have sounded 20 years ago: Big company pays 150 mil for small company, renounces said small company’s major revenue stream by giving its product away. Rest assured that Nokia will lose Qt licensees. But as they correctly calculated, it does not matter. If Nokia wants to fight Android and the iPhone, they’d better have a decent software platform, and it better be free. 150 million is chump change for them: Nokia’s market cap is around U$53 billion.

A more interesting problem (for us involved with the VisTrails project, at least) is what happens with PyQt, the incredibly well-designed Python bindings for Qt. PyQt is developed by Riverbank Computing, which is really a synonym for ``Phil Thompson’s one-man show’’. If you pay for Qt, buying PyQt for everyone essentially costs you every sixth Qt license, which is not very much at all. But now that Qt is LGPL, what is Phil to do?

Well, he can’t really make PyQt LGPL, as he’d just sink his company. But you could argue that he can’t not make it LGPL either. For once, PyQt would be the only commercial barrier for writing commercial Python software with Qt, and I have a feeling that people would actively try to find a way around that. More importantly, with Qt being LGPL and no Python bindings to go with that, it’d be just a matter of time until someone else starts an LGPL PyQt clone. But it’s essentially impossible that any new effort will be as good as PyQt is. So, there will be fragmentation of the community and a big waste of development effort. Crucially, this outcome is bad for Nokia. If Phil sticks around by himself, chances are Nokia loses money.

So for Nokia to keep around a great set Python bindings for Qt, they just have to ensure Riverbank wants to make PyQt LGPL. And the easiest way is simply to buy the company, hire Phil Thompson, and make him PyQt dictator for life. So, Phil, it’s time to buy a new suit!

Now it is all but official, and the writing is on the wall for Qt. It was announced today that Nokia are selling the Qt licensing rights to some random company (man, that is one ugly URL!). Qt is still head and shoulders above any other GUI toolkit. I haven’t kept up with PyQt, but it’s not looking good. Pyside are exactly the kind of bindings I thought would surface; they have reached 1.0 last week.

My point about Nokia, Android, and iOS also turned out to be central to how this whole affair played out. It’s sad that after years of being a great product, Qt gets killed by MS the cash juggernaut, and mostly as a side effect. Notice, incidentally, that Nokia’s market cap is about half of what it was back then.

Don’t get me wrong, Qt will be no doubt forked. But what made Qt great was its documentation and its (comparably speaking) attention to API design. No other open-source GUI toolkit I have used has come anywhere close to it, and I have no reason to believe such a fork would inherit these good traits from Qt. At least superficially, this seems to be good news for wxWidgets.

Still, as I write this, I can’t shake the feeling that it is HTML5 that will be the lowest-common-denominator GUI toolkit for application development (even for locally hosted, off-the-web deployments) of this decade. But that’s for another post.