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

Re:KDE Qt Free Foundation

[morgan_greywolf]

I really hope that the KDE Qt Free Foundation agreements are valid because I have a gut feeling that they will be tested in court soon... Interesting. TFA states that Nokia plans to continue to develop Qt, though, and will continue to offer it under both open source and commercial licenses, just as things are now.

I assume that means as long as Nokia continues to develop Qt in the same manner (keeping Qt Free available for KDE), then the agreement doesn't apply.

Re:KDE Qt Free Foundation

[kripkenstein]

Interesting. TFA states that Nokia plans to continue to develop Qt, though, and will continue to offer it under both open source and commercial licenses, just as things are now.

I assume that means as long as Nokia continues to develop Qt in the same manner (keeping Qt Free available for KDE), then the agreement doesn't apply.

Yes, all Nokia needs to do is keep Qt development on a low burner to avoid BSD-ization of their code. Not hard to do.

I don't see Nokia as interested in the Linux desktop, so I presume that part of Trolltech's work will not continue exactly as before; why pay the salaries of several KDE developers, for example - not sure Nokia will see the point in that. I don't predict immediate firings, though, but if I was one of them I wouldn't count on long-term job security. What I do see Nokia as wanting from Trolltech is everything related to mobile devices, Qtopia, all that stuff. So overall Qt may continue to be developed, but I'm not sure its focus won't move to one that is less useful for KDE.

Of course, this risk with KDE basing itself on Qt was obvious all the time due to the licensing model there. It is probably part of the reason why all major distros have moved to GNOME.

Re:KDE Qt Free Foundation

[vhogemann]

Hummm,

It's nice to have GTK and all, but look at QT4, it has much more advanced features. KDE3.5 already has a smaller memory footprint than Gnome, thanks to QT4 KDE4 will have an even smaller footprint.

There were the GreenPhone. Also, there's already a Windows Mobile port of QT4, proving that it's well suited for embedded devices. And QT4 has Java bindings, witch is widely used on cellphone development as it is sandboxed.

Pehaps Nokia is looking into replacing Symbian with a Linux stack? Pehaps they found out GTK lacking? Pehaps they fell the need to be able to control more directly the development of their toolkit of choice?

Time will tell.

Good News

[MrCopilot]

I see a lot of fear in the eyes of Geekdom. Relax my brethren.

Your fear is unwarranted. My take on this: Nokia is a getting a little leary of MS gaining increasing control at Novell with their hand up Miguel.

Besides, basing your products on GTK is hard, there I said it.

QT is a programmer's dream to work with. Fully documented, Open Source, (or Closed if your PHB is twitchy) Cross compatible, and simple. Got a problem a shout out to the trolls usually clears it up. Licensor or not.

Nokia makes hardware and wants to control their own destiny. Makes perfect business sense, but so does keeping the good will of the community. Recent foibles with the n700 taught them that.

I use only KDE, I develop Desktop Applications and Embedded Devices using QT. It would be fair to call me a fanboy of the Trolls. I also have an unhealthy desire to own a n810, n700, and n800. The only thing holding me back was that I hate the GTK based Maemo toolkit. Recently KDE was ported, and with this development is making it difficult for me to contain the copious amounts drool.