Nokia is closing down its Brisbane, Australia office with effect from the end of August 2012 in a move that appears to spells the end of Nokia's involvement with Qt.

The news that staff who have been working on Qt3D, QtDeclarative, QtMultimedia, QtSensors, and QtSystems modules, as well as the CI/QA team for Qt are being laid off by Nokia was posted on the Qt community mailing list by Nokia developer Lorn Potter.

He noted that the individuals concerned would be able to continue to work on the open source project and that he himself intends to keep working on the QML (Qt MetaLanguage) toolkit.

Qt is a C++ framework that can be used to develop cross-platform mobile and desktop applications. The software was originally developed by Trolltech, which was then bought by Nokia.

Last year Nokia sold its Qt commercial licensing and services business to Finnish software services company Digia but at that time announced its intention to:

"continue to invest in developing Qt as a cross-platform framework for mobile, desktop and embedded segments, focusing on open source development and expansion".

Qt 5.0, a major overhaul of the framework which will make QML and JavaScript the primary route for creating user interfaces in Qt, is due to be delivered this month having been delayed from June, reportedly to allow the framework to be more polished. During that time Nokia is believed to have ended work on a Linux-based platform for low cost handsets and has also laid off many employees, some connected to Qt.

Another posting to the community mailing list by former Nokia employee Altant Schmidt said that a reliable source had told him that “Sebastian Nyström (the Nokia Senior VP in charge of Qt) has been given explicit direction to sell-off the Qt asset”, adding “Nokia's great experiment in frameworks (mobile and otherwise) is over.”

Nokia had put forward Qt as a potential way for providing a unified API to work on both Symbian and MeeGo devices. The outlook for Qt had been considered gloomy once Nokia turned to Windows Phone 7, so the news of the closure and layoffs was to some extent anticipated.