Wednesday, June 20, 2012: Linux Melancholy Begins! Linux may land in a turbulent phase seeing various industry players abandoning the platform and the latest to do that after Dell is Nokia. It was only eight months back that Nokia announced to stick to its MeeGo technology as the basis for Meltemi operating system, but now we hear a different version from the company. Massive job and project slashing have been slated as the reasons for the Linux prototype drop by the plagued company. The success of Android is quite visible and the Linux saga has even moved to various IT sectors like cloud, Web services and virtualisation but there's a flip side too.
Besides Android, Linux doesn't have much to do in the smartphone market. There have been several attempts by other companies to push it on the mobile platform to compete with Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Moblin project, managed by Linux foundation and sponsored by Intel, states a perfect example. It later was merged with Nokia's Maemo platform to become MeeGo and once again would have evolved if Samsung lead a merger with LiMo Foundation to give life to Tizen.

Now with this, the 'Qt' question comes in the picture, to which Nokia replied that the heart of MeeGo will be still in play. Even otherwise if Nokia abdicates QT, it will not effect the latter as it is still under free software license.

Aaron Seigo, developer, Qt, said, “The most important thing to keep in mind is that Qt is licensed under the LGPL and has a broad ecosystem around it. Regardless of what happens at Nokia, it won't be the end of the world.”

To encourage Linux-as-mobile-platform, a lot needs to be done. Every other hardware vendor is becoming Android-centric, there's only Samsung's Linux-based Bada breathing without much friction. The situation gets more intense when we see desktop platforms abandoning Linux. Dell incurring a 33 per cent decrease in its profits may not sell preloaded Ubuntu machines further and if the sales don't improve, others vendors might also shift from Linux to more profit friendly desktop environments. Also the UEFI/Secure Boot requirements coming for Windows 8-certified machines make the Linux survival more tougher.

Well, the storm probability for Linux is pretty high and alarming but we can't zero on it seeing the present stats and situations, we can always hope and hope never dies.