Hot topic these days: Mobile applications, RIP - Offline web applications. Of course the Web2.0 guys (let me put it this way) have an agenda, but the developers tied to native environments have it as well. What to believe? There are many moving targets these days.

In the last years we have seen the omnipresent web eating space to the native desktop, from webmail and remote Flash games to the Google suite and the desktop inside browser experiments. This fight is getting tougher in the mobile context, where many factors seem to oppose resistance to classic software development: platform fragmentation, unstable API, demanding UI, restrictive write access, security buzz… We are even hearing about learning curves when it comes to compare C, C++ or Java to the languages brought by the WWW assisted by envisioned web APIs that will do the rest for you (apparently).

Native development had a safe past in mobile devices thanks to its optimized use of resources and its 99,9% professional/commercial motivation, but things are changing. The devices are getting more powerful allowing a thicker layer of abstraction without affecting dramatically the performance. Light application development is favoured by Flash, widgets and the web family of languages running offline. Microsoft’s Silverlight, Adobe’s Air, S60’s Web Run-Time… they are already here. Even something like Facebook development is getting increasing attention/fuzz. Thankfully the W3C is also approaching the field.

How Linux and open source developers are taking all this?

PS: I’m personally curious about Python and Ruby in this context, having both offline/runtime and online/net success stories.

PS2: True, I didn’t mention Android or the iPhone SDK.

There is something beautiful in here, somehow. Click to enlarge.

Troll Door, by Irish Typepad

Nokia going after Trolltech and Trolltech going inside Nokia, that’s an interesting move. Somewhat surprising move (I also knew about it by reading the press releases), but sensible in fact. The community reactions have been as interesting. No wonder, in this story you can find all the elements for a free software soap opera and for hilarious pub-level discussions as well. I believe the actual steps are slightly less emotional, though.

Obviously people want to know how this affects to maemo, and I made some research to confirm the guess. When it comes to maemo, there are no Trolltech/Qt related plans at the moment. As you know the maemo stack depends heavily on the GNOME components. Nokia has been supporting many GNOME projects and the GNOME ecosystem itself (Foundation and some companies) both with resources, public backing and code. There are no changes in these relationships and, in fact, within the context of evolution of the maemo platform the trend is to push more innovation through these channels and to strengthen the collaboration with the community upstream.

On the mid term… well, nobody knows. What follows are my thoughts today.

Looking the Nokia/Trolltech move from a KDE vs GNOME perspective would be a mistake. Looking at my collection of GNOME t-shirts I’m also tempted in taking this situation from a football fan point of view, but things are much more serious than that. There are many actors and software components in this Middle Earth of mobile platforms where maemo lives. The potential combinations are many and everybody is looking for the right one. The competition is fierce, specially when it comes to the mobile desktop. What if you need the best of both platforms to succeed with a proposal based on Linux & open source?

Qt is one piece of the KDE project, as GTK+ is one piece of the GNOME platform, but there is a lot more inside both projects, and even more elsewhere in the open source community. Many GNOME components present in the maemo platform (some of them also part of the Freedesktop.org initiative) are top class and Nokia keeps contributing to them. The Trolltech acquisition plans don’t affect these components in any way, not even in the mid term.

GTK+, Qt and related UI toolkits are definitely in the hot spot, receiving from many directions a big pressure to push the next mobile user interfaces. Nokia invests in GTK+ development for maemo and the Trolltech acquisition implies that Nokia plans to invest more in Qt development. This shows to me a clearer commitment to the open source game. Additionally, both investments benefit GNOME, KDE and the free desktop development in general, mobile or not. My conclusion: an interesting move.

If you still don’t get why Nokia wants to acquire Trolltech, please continue reading.

A first advice to any free software lover willing to understand: get to know what are the main businesses of Nokia and Trolltech nowadays. Yes, Nokia sells phones and Nokia has a Linux & GTK+ based platform called maemo for the not-a-phone Internet tablets. And yes, Trolltech supports the development of KDE. But both do a lot more, and their core business strategies have other key elements.

Trolltech develops Qt, a cross-platform application development framework that powers KDE and is also licensed to many commercial software projects. Nokia pushes the Symbian OS with several own platforms on top like S60, <edited>plus S40 running on top of its own Nokia developed OS</edited>, plus several non-mobile applications like Nokia PC Suite (developed with Qt, by the way). Trolltech’s toolkit and its C++ native language (which is native in Symbian as well) fit very well in Nokia’s short term strategy to improve cross-compatibility between the Symbian platforms. If making a good use of the Qt library helps having in maemo some of the cool stuff available in S60, all the better then.

This is the main reason why Nokia wants to acquire Trolltech. There are other interesting elements in the table like the Linux & open source skills but none of them would push such move alone. Personally, I wish getting Trolltech’s intelligence in house will help in other fronts as well, remarkably adding weight to the open source & community involvement agendas many of us are pushing internally. Putting Qt’s cross-platform capabilities to work on the PC side would be also nice, getting better support for Mac & Linux users.

All in all a good move if you, like me, think that a company like Nokia can have an important role pushing Linux & open source to the real mainstream. Even if it takes a while.

The N810 discounts for maemo contributors will be ready to be used in the online Nokia shops taking part of this program… next week. I was reluctant to give any date when I mentioned ‘around 15/dec’ and I’m still reluctant to give any exact day of next week since the factors are many and at maemo we don’t control any of them.

The unrelated good thing about this delay is that we have found extra time to agree the inclusion of Nokia Canada in the program. Contributors living in Canada will be able to get their discounted devices without international hassle, no matter what shop they selected when applying.

Instructions and codes for everybody next week.

Thanks to Murray, Jeff and others we are seeing now explicitely that critique and self-critique is not necessarely easy in open environments populated by volunteering freedom lovers. You think you are in an open environment where everybody can speak out, until you try to challenge the boundaries. Starting with yourself and your inner boundaries.

Are you telling everything you would like to tell? I certainly don’t. Shyness, respect, busy time, evaluation of potential reactions, lack of better alternatives… there are many reasons to freely decide not to be totally open about something / someone.

Are you being self-critique, even to yourself? That’s even more difficult to know. I think I am, and for instance this is why I decided not to run for re-election. I could be wrong, though. Many times someone told me something about me that I had been overlooking / ignoring / avoiding. Self-critique is a tough exercise, easier once you start though.

But what is relevant to the GNOME Foundation and the elections: we are not prepared to critique and self-critique. Board members leave a mandate without telling what went right and what went wrong, who did better and who did worse. We are volunteers and we respect each other: why getting into these potential personal troubles. There is not a mechanism for evaluation or even self evaluation, besides you being free to speak out or shut up.

Due to the function of the board, the critique is not so much about politics (opinions about topics) than about efficiency (ability to administer stuff individually and in a team). In this sense the opinions of those working regularly with the candidates are useful to figure out who to vote. Getting the positive opinions help, but getting also the hard critique would help more.

Political opposition in democratic systems help the citizenship to figure out what is really going on. When someone presents explicit opposition he is helping our democratic process, no matter how accurate his arguments are, no matter how much you agree or disagree about them. Speak out, listen, discuss, vote: these are the basis of democracy (and consensus).