Digia to acquire Qt from Nokia

[spirit]

Helsinki, Finland and Santa Clara, US - August 9th 2012, Digia, the software powerhouse listed on the NASDAQ OMX Helsinki exchange (DIG1V), today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Qt software technologies and Qt business from Nokia. Following the acquisition Digia becomes responsible for all the Qt activities formerly carried out by Nokia. These include product development, as well as the commercial and open source licensing and service business. Following the acquisition, Digia plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms.

Official site news (http://digia.com/en/Home/Company/News/Digia-to-acquire-Qt-from-Nokia/)

[Zlatomir]

Very good news.

[spirit]

Yup, I also think so. I was afraid that Google could be first...

[Zlatomir]

My two cents i bet on Intel, good that i didn't bet more ;)

I like that they also announced that Qt will be officially ported to Android and IOS.

[high_flyer]

I like that they also announced that Qt will be officially ported to Android and IOS.
Something I think many were waiting for.
If this is indeed achieved, I think it will push Qt really to be "everywhere"!

[d_stranz]

Something I think many were waiting for.
If this is indeed achieved, I think it will push Qt really to be "everywhere"!

That was the main thing holding me back from investigating mobile computing. Porting my apps to a cell phone makes no sense at all, but a tablet is entirely feasible.

[spirit]

Apparently, the price Digia paid for the rest of Qt was EUR4m (US$4.9m).

That's quite a mark-down from the US$150m Nokia paid to buy Trolltech in 2008!.

Wrote Atlant Schmidt on 13 Aug 13:57 here (http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.qt.user/3146) & here (http://www.financial-news.co.uk/6900/2012/08/finnish-handset-maker-nokia-exits-its-qt-business-at-a-e146m-loss/).

Is Nokia dying?

[d_stranz]

My two cents i bet on Intel, good that i didn't bet more

I wouldn't stop betting quite yet. Intel could still buy Digia like they did Wind River a few years ago.


Is Nokia dying?

I think Nokia is having a very hard time keeping its market share in the mobile phone business, against the competition from Motorola and Apple. I don't think the Windows phone is doing very well against Android phones, and Nokia sold off Symbian over a year ago.

[graciano]

But will Qt remain opensource?
What does QT Commercial mean anyway?

[Zlatomir]

@graciano: Yes, Qt will still be available open source and read more about Qt commercial here (http://www.digia.com/en/Qt/Services/) (also you can ask Digia if you need more details) but as far as i know basically Qt Commercial is based on support for Qt and you can use static linked Qt without your application to be open source and also if you modify the sources (of Qt framework) you can keep those closed source too (basically you don't have LGPL restrictions).

[graciano]

How is that?
Supose i never heard about Qt before!
In this case we endup in here http://qt.digia.com/Try-Qt-Now/ filling a form with personal data in order to receive a download link.

Thank you for downloading the Qt evaluation!

You will receive an e-mail shortly containing download link and a license key for installing Qt.

Please provide us with feedback of your experiences using Qt or hints about how we can serve you better.

Make sure to visit our Qt blog to keep up to date with all our releases and relevant product information. blog.qt.digia.com

This is not exactly my idea of opensource!

[spirit]

You can download Qt from qt-project.org (http://qt-project.org/). There is downloads section.

[wysota]

How is that?
Supose i never heard about Qt before!
In this case we endup in here http://qt.digia.com/Try-Qt-Now/ filling a form with personal data in order to receive a download link.

This is not exactly my idea of opensource!

If you read closely, there is a link lower in the page leading you here:

http://qt.digia.com/Product/Licensing/

which will lead you directly to qt-project.org if you want to use the OS licence.

[d_stranz]

In this case we end up in here http://qt.digia.com/Try-Qt-Now/ filling a form with personal data in order to receive a download link.

Unlike Nokia, Digia is a software company, and they make all their money from licensing software and services. If you look at their Web page, it seems to me that commercial licensing of Qt is probably a tiny part of their business, so you might expect them to try to make more money off of it however they can. I am not surprised if you have to dig to find the link to the OS version. It is hard for me to believe that revenue generated for the commercial version of Qt is enough to pay all the employees who work on it. I am not sure what the business reasons are for Digia to have bought it in the first place. At USD 1500 or so per year for commercial support, you need a lot of licenses to pay for each developer's salary.

On the other hand, if they have bought the rights to Qt from Nokia and are paying their employees to develop and maintain it, is there any legal requirement that they must keep an OS version available? Could they freeze some version as the last OS version, then continue development and ports only under non-OS (i.e. commercial) terms? I don't know the law on this, just wondering.

[wysota]

It is hard for me to believe that revenue generated for the commercial version of Qt is enough to pay all the employees who work on it. I am not sure what the business reasons are for Digia to have bought it in the first place. At USD 1500 or so per year for commercial support, you need a lot of licenses to pay for each developer's salary.
Digia is mostly a consulting company.


is there any legal requirement that they must keep an OS version available?
Yes, LGPL guarantees that.


Could they freeze some version as the last OS version, then continue development and ports only under non-OS (i.e. commercial) terms?
There is a poison pill paragraph in the contract (I don't know if Digia means to acknowledge it) that if the owner stops releasing Qt as Open Source, the last available version is automatically released under BSD licence (so anyone can continue work on it and even sell it commercially). Considering the fact that much of Qt development and testing is done by OS people, closing Qt completely would be a kind of suicide to the commercial branch.

[d_stranz]

Digia is mostly a consulting company.

Yes, I see that. Hard to believe that Qt support would generate the same kinds of revenue as their ERP, finance, and manufacturing consulting. I guess they must use it for internal development so owning it may have some advantages if they can utilize Qt developers to help with commercial support.


There is a poison pill paragraph in the contract

Good to know this, thanks.

[Zlatomir]

d_stranz, as you guessed, Digia's investment in Qt could be "paid" with the usage of Qt to build their software on many platforms (i think that is why Digia said they want to port Qt to iOs and Android as soon as possible - they have software for mobile) and using one framework to target many platforms i think it means a big saving in training cost for developers and this cost can cover the salaries of those that create the framework to target those platforms.

And also other companies have employes that contribute to Qt, example: Intel is a pretty big contributor (and since they have plans to make money from software too, i actually believed Intel will buy Qt form Nokia), i think KDE guys also have a lot of contributions, so some of the development is actually paid by other companies/foundations/community/... (this is another reason to keep Qt open source).