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."

Comments

Smart move!

[superash]

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.

Re:KDE Qt Free Foundation

[spectrokid]

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,..... ;-)

So what happens to Maemo

[GauteL]

.. and the investments Nokia has made into GTK+?

And how will Nokia's competitors that currently use Qt for their mobile products take this?

KDE is important for Trolltech and Qt

[vdboor]

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.