Digia To Acquire Qt From Nokia 152
First time accepted submitter MrvFD writes "Ever since the most recent layoffs were announced by Nokia last month and the end of Qt related programs at Nokia was rumored, the fate of Qt has been in the air despite it nowadays having a working open governance model. Fear no longer, Qt brand, since Digia has now announced acquiring the Qt organization from Nokia. While relatively unknown company to the masses, it has already been selling the non-free (non-LGPL) licenses of Qt for 1.5 years. Hopefully this'll mean a bright future for Qt in co-operation with other Qt wielding companies like Google, RIM, Canonical, Intel, Skype, Microsoft, Jolla and the thousands of Qt open source and commercial license users. Digia now plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms, where work has already been underway for some time."
Borland (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Borland (Score:2, Insightful)
Embarcado bought CodeGear not Borland. CodeGear being the spunoff company from Borland to handle Delphi/C++ Builder, etc. Borland was bought by Micro Focus.
in related news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nokia sells patents to a patent troll: suicide by M$ almost complete.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120809005600/en/Vringo-Nokia-Execute-Patent-Purchase-Agreement [businesswire.com]
That's it for Nokia....all the talent has left, and now they sold the last real assets to a troll. M$'s trail of destruction continues.
- credit to phands on IV for pointing this out.
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BMO
rename Digia as Trolltech (Score:5, Insightful)
Good.
Now Digia should acquire the Trolltech trademark as well if they haven't, and rebrand themselves as Trolltech. Then everyone could forget Nokia ever happened.
Re:Digia ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh huh. Except that many of their commercial licenses are contingent on Linux and Unix support hence why Digia continued to suppirt Linux and Unix platforms that Nokia officially dropped support for.
Re:1.5years means the deal was made with Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't really matter Qt is under open governance. And if the toolkit is failed to be released, it all goes BSD. So begin that speculation. If MS "killed" Qt, it would free it. MS has two possible position here: .NET.
1. Qt as LGPL or commercial. This limits Qt more than:
2. Qt as BSD. A top-notch C++ library that runs on all platforms would be competition to
I believe that #2 is the worst outcome for MS, especially given their failing position in approval (Win 8, Win Phone). The only benefit to #2 for MS is they can run Qt themselves, but they won't because .NET is their baby.
Re:Digia ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Their market cap is only about 50 million euro - significantly less than the 104 million euro Nokia paid for Trolltech back in 2008 and you get the rest of Digia for free. I'd wager that Digia paid less than 10 million for this, with Nokia taking a loss of over 90%, maybe even 99%. The thing is, I don't see who'd buy it today. Apple and Android have their own toolkits on mobile, Microsoft and Apple have their own toolkit on desktop so nobody needs it to sell hardware except maybe RIM. Going back to the dual GPL/commercial licensing model is nearly hopeless now that it's gone LGPL, people will fork off the last release and split the community. It's a nice product but I don't see how you'd make money on it.
Re:"M$" already gives you off as a neckbeard, but. (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly I read his article in Business week where he outlined the logic. The whole thing makes sense. Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware. Balmer wanted the credibility Nokia bought him and had cash. It was a dangerous play but I don't buy it was corrupt. It makes a lot of sense for the board / shareholder's perspective where chewing up the equity and bankruptcy are roughly equivalent.
Nokia didn't need anything. And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets. They had a credible OS and one they didn't need to pay someone else for. And as someone else pointed out, they were profitable and didn't need the cash. Their ability to remain profitable changed only after they started pursuing Windows at all costs.
If you want to get an accurate picture of what Microsoft and Stephen Elop did - try reading this blog [blogs.com] from a former Nokia Exec that is highly respected in Mobile Phone Sales. You'll see why Nokia is doing so poorly and having to sell off everything, and why Windows Phone will be a no-go (and who made it such).
Re:rename Digia as Trolltech (Score:4, Insightful)
If Nokia never happened, there wouldn't have been an LGPL version of Qt.