Candyland Gets Paved. Again. Repeatedly.

I'm getting a bit tired of being so curmudgeonly. I can't help it tho. All my toys are being taken away.

First Novell acquires SuSE Linux, which I have been fairly skeptical of since the purchase was announced. Then Nokia ate Trolltech, the place where my favorite Qt was grown. And then Oracle ate Sun Microsystems, the ones who kept expanding the boundaries of software engineering and releasing such leaps to the public (usually (sometimes)). Now Oracle is smacking around robust and growing projects that have served the software engineering good for many years now.

And now Novell is bought by Attachmate, with 882 patents being absorbed by a Microsoft subsidiary. The openSUSE team says everything is "business as usual,", but there are very strong indications that this will not always be so.

Maybe this is just the ebb and flow that is technology capitalism... but all my power tools seem to be disappearing. If Apache and JBoss are bought by Philip Morris, I'm going to freakin' lose it.

Two Great Tastes - maemo & Qt

Fresh off the wire, it has been announced that Nokia will introduce Qt, my favorite C++ toolkit, to the maemo platform, my favorite portable hardware platform. Two great tastes that go great together.

If this kind of platform expansion and cooperation with Qt developers (such as KDE authors) is what will come of the Nokia acquisition of Trolltech, it may not be as bad as I predicted. Here's to hoping that Nokia sees Qt as a toolkit that will serve mobile, embedded and desktop platforms. Especially with the recent fame of low-cost low-footprint laptops, Qt and maemo have to be getting some additional attention.

If the WiMAX-enabled Nokia 810 becomes more powerful and popular, the addition of Qt and simplified cross-compiling could provide a huge increase of third-party applications hosted on an already open mobile device.

Nokia Acquires Trolltech & Qt

Trolltech, maker of my favorite development platform Qt 4, just announced they're being purchased by Nokia. Damn.

History has pretty much shown that the independent, open-source shops being purchased by mega-corps have largely resulted in a slovenly product. Novell's purchase of SuSE has resulted in a distro that kernel dumps... kernel dumps occasionally on bootup. I don't hold fantastic hopes for Qt 4 unfortunately.

It appears that others share my scepticism. A good deal of comments to LWN - which still boasts a pretty coherent readership - seems to also have the sort of timidity stemming from being burned before. The Register, which prints an overall positive article, still feels it needs to assert Nokia has made claims of continuing Qt development.

It feels at the same time like the OSS world is shrinking and expanding. While awareness and adoption is at an all-time high, the high-profile projects are starting to be absorbed into the same machine they raged against.