After Nokia bought Qt-developer Trolltech, a lot of people where raising questions about the future of Maemo, as the mobile software uses GTK+ as central piece of its platform. Those people now seem to have gotten an answer: During a keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit Nokia's Quim Gil announced that a future release of Maemo is going to be built around Qt.

Further planning

While Maemo 5 is still going to be based on GTK+ / Hildon, in the release after that - codenamed Harmattan - Qt will take its role. GTK+ / Hildon on the other hand will be reduced to a "Community supported"-status, a role Qt holds for now.

Cross-plattform

In front of a mixture of hackers from both the KDE and GNOME camps - the GCDS is co-hosting the respective developer conferences Akademy and GUADEC - Gil explained Nokias motivation for this move as being mostly driven through the desire for easier cross-platform-development, citing Maemo, Symbian and the desktop as examples.

GNOME mobile

On the other hand the development platform product manager stresses that this does in no way signify a total break with the GNOME mobile platform. A lot of the components that are used in Maemo 5 are also going to be present in "Harmattan" and the following release. Gil also was quick to point out, that this might be a good chance for increase collaboration between both Desktop worlds, hinting at Nokia taking a more active role in this regard in the future.  (Andreas Proschofsky  [@suka_hiroaki on Twitter] reporting from Las Palmas / Gran Canaria, derStandard.at, 04.07.2009)