Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters)

Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters)

Yeah, Nokia seems to have a potentially fatal case of not-invented-here syndrome. It's the same illness that made the OLPC project such a disaster.

One would argue that OLPC has been anything but a disaster in the larger scheme of things: the concept of the netbook became more pervasive, despite the best efforts of Microsoft to tax/suppress that kind of product (and of Apple to belittle the concept whilst offering something similar for ten times the price); the screen technology is a lot better than stuff that the LCD cartel is still forcing people to have. And I'd rather people tried out new interfaces than copy stuff like Vista, which is what KDE 4 seemed to be all about.

And in the few cases they did try to reuse things, they were always things that didn't quite make sense to reuse. Like what is QT doing on a cell phone? Don't get me wrong, QT is a great toolkit-- for developing desktop applications. But the wrong set of assumptions are baked in-- stuff like "the user will have a mouse."

I don't know what irrevocable assumptions Qt has, although I believe it had stuff like gesture support a while ago, but from my limited experience playing with PyQt every now and again, the biggest obstacle with Qt is how much stuff the libraries contain and how much pruning has to be done to get the footprint down to something that us "old timers" would feel comfortable putting on an embedded system.

There's also the argument that the various paradigms don't really translate to effective non-desktop interfaces. I played around a bit with the model-view stuff in order to mock up a small-screen interface (which was actually quite convenient given the Qt VNC backend, and as I noted elsewhere, convenient testing during development is crucial), and it got to the point where I'd need to develop a widget to convey the information I needed to, and as with many GUI toolkits, I started to feel that the amount of work required was about to increase significantly (and started to wish I was doing the thing in something ultra-simple like PyGame).

I agree with much of your assessment except...

Ironically, if they had gone with the BSD-licensed Android, Nokia would have been able to modify the OS and probably somehow force it to use Ovi rather than Gmail, Google Calendar, and so forth.

Android is GPL- and Apache 2.0-licensed, depending on which bits you're looking at. And modifying the OS is something they could do under either licence, although I imagine that what you mean is that they could modify things and keep it proprietary under the BSD or, in reality, Apache 2.0 licences.

Of course, if Nokia paid more than lip-service to openness, rather than saying "These bits are closed, do not ask why! Join us!" they'd have their developer ecosystem.

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