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Nokia Buys Trolltech
egil writes "Trolltech announced this morning (CET) that they have accepted a bid from Nokia to buy the entire company. The bid was for 16 NOK per share, which values the company at an equivalent of approximately 150 million USD. The stock currently trades at 15.70 on the Oslo stack exchange, up from around 10 on Friday. The offer has already been accepted by the Trolltech BOD."
TrollTech: $150 million
MySQL: 1 BILLION!
Now that Nokia has got the OpenC and the PythonForS60 community growing rapidly, there was need for a better UI which I think will be provided by Qt. More developers -> more apps -> high user base.
Why? Nokia does not make OS'es or IDE's. They make mobile phones, and they are pretty fucking good at it. If they get a good QT, they can release multiplatform PC software for synching their phones to Any OS(TM). The more it is open, the better the quality will be. Remember they are competing against Windows Mobile. I have a HTC and I have to say, under windows the cooperation between PC and mobile is near perfect. (I miss writing SMS-es from the PC keyboard though...). Having a cross-platform, open and good quality dev platform will help them whacking MS where it hurts. I, for one,..... ;-)
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Finally they can compete with Android with a decent platform. They probably have seen that Symbian is no longer good enough as a multitasking environment, and probably too difficult and expensive to add features to. And you would never ever attempt to run it on anything other than a phone thus making more difficult to build a whole platform ranging from small game consoles, PDAs, music players and the "next small thing" :)
Moderation is overrated.
.. and the investments Nokia has made into GTK+?
And how will Nokia's competitors that currently use Qt for their mobile products take this?
The Qt toolkit allows rapid development of nice mobile and desktop application. A Nokia slide on the role of Qt in the company seems to suggest they want to use Qt to write applications that work and look the same on their mobile phones and on the desktop the user might have (be it Windows, Mac or Linux).
source
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
"They make mobile phones, and they are pretty fucking good at it. If they get a good QT, they can release multiplatform PC software for synching their phones to Any OS(TM). The more it is open, the better the quality will be."
One does not buy a toolkit company to build one application. Nokia could easily already "create multiplatform PC software for synching their phones to Any OS(TM)". Qt is already plenty good enough to do this and there are even perfectly reasonable alternatives.
Nokia are buying Trolltech for Qtopia, the mobile phone platform, which happens to be their core business. Therefore it is completely reasonable to question their commitment to desktop Qt, which at the moment has little to do with their core business.
In reality...
It's six of one, half dozen of another on GTK+ versus Qt.
There's not really a slap in the face when you think about it. Qtopia presents an entire environment
for making mobile phones. Maemo presents a more sophisticated environment for making more than
capable smart phones and network-centric appliance devices. While Qtopia's capable of the other,
it's not quite the same beast as what they came up with for themselves for that purpose- and Qtopia
makes some good sense on things like the average phones now all seem to have in functionality,
whereas Maemo doesn't quite fit the bill because of footprint.
As for the licensing... If they discontinue some form of free licensing of Qt, there will be at
least the GPL fork, if not a BSD fork. Trolltech saw to it that there would be few complaints
about the FOSS use of their library, including having an escape clause for the KDE project to
BSD license the entire library at their discretion if Qt was taken solely proprietary or withdrawn
completely.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This is an enormous company, not an IRC channel. I'm not surprised that they don't don't have a standard position on toolkit flamewar-age.
In my experience, when company buys another company, they always promise that everything will stay the same... and they almost always renege on that statement 6~12 months after the acquisition.
*shrug* it's just one of those things that people/companies say to ease friction during a transition, and not because they really mean it.
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
You're missing an important detail here. KDE is important for Trolltech and the continued development of Qt. The CEO of Trolltech explained a few weeks ago in fact that Trolltech became a successful company because of KDE, not despite KDE.
Trolltech profits from the tons of feedback and publicity they get through KDE. In their first years they didn't have to do marketing at all! Qt has credibility in the commercial world because a complete desktop environment is built upon it. New Qt features or API's are pushed to their limits due to their immense use by KDE. This improves the overall quality of Qt, ability to reach enterprise customers, and we're back to square 1.
Destroying that upward spiral would hurt Qt development. Trolltech knows this, and so does Nokia.
* KDE also benefits from the relation with Trolltech, since they get an enterprise-quality toolkit in return. Trolltech also does the boring stuff which is typical for toolkit development (they can pay people to work on it!), and sponsors some KDE core-developers full-time.
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
Will very likely stay EXACTLY THE SAME.
If Nokia change it too much, people will move. For the people using the commercial version, it's *easier* to stay as long is it isn't punitive.
As to your BSD hope, why the hell would Nokia take it BSD? What do Nokia get that they don't already? And they've lost free updates (the GPL reciprocity) and they can't stop others improving Nokia's work and denying the improvements to Nokia (in the BSD version). If Nokia don't want someone else taking FREE development off Nokia's dollar, they'd have three versions:
1) GPL version
2) BSD version
3) Their own version
at best they could drop the GPL, but at the moment, the ONLY difference between the GPL and commercial version is the license. They have one codebase, so it's still at least double the work.
And for what? So Tivoli can use them for their UI? But they don't have to pay Nokia, just take the BSD version.
Now, they might use LGPL, but that only cannibalises the commercial licenses to make it "more popular", but why would Nokia, a for-profit company, ignore shareholder value and reduce profit "to be more popular"?
If they release all desktop Qt (mac,linux and windows) under BSD, then they'll lose most of the support subscribers. This will result in Nokia pulling developers from the division as it will be losing lots of money. Then we end up with community supported Qt only.
Commercial users can get screwed if Nokia stops development on Qt. If they continue at current pace or actually fix most of the bugs in their BTS, the better for commercial users. Heck, since Nokia is already using Qt, they are a commercial user and I don't see them screwing themselves.
From a letter I received, Trolltech will continue to function as an independent unit in Nokia so I don't think much has changed except the management.
Do they have a track record of "doing the wrong thing" that they've only deviated from a time or two? Why assume it's going to get much worse now?
When you're Red Hat, you don't want to build your OS in a way that lets another corporation control a critical aspect of it.Kind of like how they're no longer using the GPLv2-only Linux kernel. Gotcha.
I never have understood why QT is always held to a different standard than other software. Even though it's GPLv2 + GPLv3 + closed if you wanna pay for it, that just doesn't please some people.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Unless there is money to be made by supporting QT for KDE, don't count on Nokia being as friendly toward the Open Source Community as Trolltech was.
Nokia has recently been implicated in accepting almost 90 Million Euro's in subsidies from Germany to operate an R&D and Production facility on Bochum, Germany. The subsidy contract expired in the end of last year, and guess what? Nokia recently announced they are closing shop in Germany, putting almost 3,000 workers out of a job (many of whom have been with the company over 20 years) and moving production to Romania where they claim production labor costs are 10x lower than in Germany. The funny thing is, the plant in Germany was profitable. And furthermore, production labor costs only account for less than 2% of Nokia's total costs. There are calls for a Nokia Boycott in Germany, which just happens to be Nokia's largest market in the EU.
Now if Nokia would screw with their largest market in the EU to save less than 2% in costs, do you really think that they will devote resources or Money to the Open Source Community by continuing development of the OSE of QT? All they need to do to prevent Qt from reverting to a BSD license is to keep things on a low burner, possibly throwing a part time developer on the project. This is what they have done with the Internet Tablet Software 2007 for the Nokia 770 Linux device. Its in a state of slow development because there is only one part time developer working on it.
It is probably part of the reason why all major distros have moved to GNOME.
Only ONE major distro that standardizes on GNOME, and that's the distro that helps fund it. All of the Ubuntus are really just one distro, so they're not standardized on anything. All the other major distros (SuSE, Mandriva, Debian, etc.) either standardize on KDE or leave the choice up to the user during install. Red Hat is standardized on GNOME. Ubuntu has GNOME as the default, and if you test Ubuntu vs Kubuntu, you can see that the latter is far less polished; also, note how the next release will be LTS only for GNOME (not KDE, not Xfce) - GNOME is the top priority. Novell's enterprise offerings are all standardized on GNOME; openSUSE defaults to GNOME, and most development focuses on GNOME, but KDE is also an option.
That leaves Mandriva and Debian in your list. Debian isn't really a 'desktop distro', so it isn't that relevant here, but yes, it has no preference for any DE. Mandriva is standardized on KDE, but I wouldn't say it is among the 'major distros', by which it is commonly meant Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu.
Sorry, but that's just not true. In the US Apple sold a lot of iPhones, but Nokia is a dominant world leader in cellphones and especially cell networks (Nokia-Siemens). The US is a weird and rather small market compared with the rest of the world. Europe and Asia is where the real action is, as you may well know. And real smartphones from the likes of Nokia have been here a lot longer than the iPhone. Apple has done just fine [in the US], but it has in no way managed to challenge Nokia for the real markets.
Oh, and I don't have anything against Apple. I'm European and I just ordered my iPhone from the US because I like the look and features. It will go nicely with my Macs.
However the iPhone will be my #3 phone as I change phones depending on my needs. I have a real smartphone in the SonyEricsson P1, a creditcard sized Samsung for going out and now the iPhone for entertainment.
Easy, they'll just bring the services to you over the Internet using free, open standards. SyncML is certainly interesting in that regard. I sync my phones from *my phone* using Zyb.com and it stores the information on the Internet. iCal syncs my calendar back from a feed.
And why focus on the desktop OS anyway? Today files are more or less independent of the OS it was created on if you want to. Webservices, my friend, is the future. And Nokia already has good sync software for their phones. And on the Mac iSync does a good job of communicating with many phones. I also believe Nokias sync well with Linux if you want to.
P.S. And Windows Mobile is not doing that well in Europe either. We like phones that work, go Symbian.
I have to say that you have a very one sided view both about both the situation in Bochum and Nokia as corporation.
Here in Finland we have been little staggered about recent events in there, or to say it straight, about the reaction the closure of Bochum plant has made in general population and also in politicians. It seems so strange that a closure of a small plant, with only 2000 employees, has generated so big reaction, after all there are justifiable reasons for the plant closure: employees cost very much compared to developing countries and in Bochum Nokia couldn't get all their supplier near them like they will have in Nokia Village in Romania.
The reaction seems just so strange when you remember that German companies have too moved lots of manufacturing jobs from Germany, and Siemens was driven from the mobile phone markets all together because they weren't cost effective. It's also strange that people forget that by closing the plant in Bochum, opening one in Romania, they employ themselves 4000 romanians. It should also be noted that atleast they are keeping the jobs in Europe and not shipping them to China. Also in larger context by keeping themselves cost effective they make sure that in future there will be European mobile phone companies, and that they won't die because of ultra low cost Chinese firms.
Yes, it's sad that people will lost their jobs, but then again, it's business as usual, nobody has a job for life. It should also be noted that it was just a matter of time when Bochum plant was to be closed, as according to notable Finnish banker Björn Wahlroos, that Nokia management would have closed the plant in 1992 if they could have afforded it: they couldn't as in Germany closing plant of decreasing work force is very expensive.
Also about Nokia and Trolltech. Nokia has its main R&D functions and personnel in Europe, they haven't outsourced or shipped their jobs away, as those jobs are best done in here not in India or China. Of course they have R&D in India and China, but that's not away from Europe as they have extended their activities. Same too will happen with Trolltech, Nokia bought them to increase value, and in case of Trolltech that means more R&D, more activities and extensions. I believe that only good will happen because of this acquisition. If the future is what the presentation held by Nokia is correct, then the community and people using Qt will benefit enormously as with same toolkit they can make applications not just to Linux, Windows and Mac OSX, but to S60, S40 and other platforms that are being developed.
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Most Novell development is Gnome oriented? Is that why Novell developed so many of their tools using QT? I'd argue that openSUSE is perhaps the best if not one of the best KDE desktops out there. KDE is clearly an after thought on Ubuntu, but very well polished in openSUSE. And every single Novell/Suse specific tool in the distro has a QT version, if not developed exclusively in QT.
You also suggest there are only 3 major distros which is also pretty short sighted. Mandriva isn't a major distro? What about Gentoo? Or Debian? Or PCLinuxOS?
And SUSE ships one of their versions with KDE as the default. You say SLED defaults to Gnome, and I wouldn't know because I haven't tried it. Either way, you can't claim that SUSE on the whole defaults to Gnome or focuses more effort on Gnome. And the parent statement is still very much false. Not every major distro has switched to Gnome. Most major distros provide support for both.
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How relevant. They closed the factory because similar factories elsewhere are more profitable. It's happening all over the world, get over it. If you think this system is rotten go into politics, don't blame a company that plays by the current rules...