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Digia To Acquire Qt From Nokia

Posted by timothy on from the well-that's-cute dept.

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."

8 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Good to hear. Maybe Digia can also push them to fix a number of the bugs they neglect since it doesn't fit into their mobile device circle jerk that never amounted to anything.

  2. Digia ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is Digia a solid company ? as in: "profitable enough not to get bought in 6 months with Qt changing hands ... again"

    1. Re:Digia ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Is Digia a solid company ? as in: "profitable enough not to get bought in 6 months with Qt changing hands ... again"

      Large ? well, depends who you compare to. Large enough when compared to whoever might buy Qt.

      Profitable? well, not enough to keep all the employees they acquired and are now acquiring through the qt org. shuffle. part of it is so that Nokia doesn't need to fire the guys(there's rumours that the guys who had been previously transferred to Digia had package offers handed over to them quite soon after the transfer).

      Profitability in previous years has been mainly from contracting in fields like Qt programming to Nokia. See the problem there? Digia got majorly fucked by Nokia's switch to Windows Phone and they had acquired a large number of the Qt organization before this already so this is not a surprise. But it remains to be seen if they can turn it profitable, however it's highly likely that they will cut the organization to some degree. During the Nokia days it apparently ballooned to thousands of devs working on Qt(With offices working on it in Finland, UK, Australia.. ), which was not good for Qt but was extremely lucrative to organizations like Digia, so there's some reasoning behind there why Nokia abandoned the platform as it was extremely expensive for them.

      Posting as anon as I did a brief stint in the (dis)organization.

    2. Re:Digia ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      They're a small company, mostly focused on ERP, and have a strong alignment with Microsoft. I'd say we can wave goodbye to QT for Linux/KDE in the not too distant future.

      For more than ten years, Microsoft has been one of Digia’s key partners. Digia provides its customers with comprehensive solutions based on Microsoft technologies. Digia is actively developing its partnership in line with the Microsoft Partner Network programme.

      http://www.digia.com/en/Home/Company/Technology-Partners/

      Pekka is a 3rd generation entrepreneur and founder of Digia, a publicly listed mobile sw-company, listed at NASDAQ OMX Helsinki. In this capacity he now acts as the Head of AppCampus, which is a 18 million euro grant fund established by Aalto University, Nokia and Microsoft.

    3. Re:Digia ? by anared · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Jolla is using it and co-operating with the people at QT Project, you should also remember QT is widely used commercially, its not just end-user products such as PC and mobile devices. Support for Android, iOS, Jolla OS/Mer/MeeGo/RIM etc and Symbian, this could be the way to make multi-platform apps for mobile devices.

  3. The greatness of Qt by CAIMLAS · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It really is a shame that Qt has languished in relative obscurity for so many years. It really is a great toolkit (and I say that as a non-programmer who has only dabbled with it).

    It's relatively simple, consistent, and has a large number of Windows-like constructor tools. It can be easily bound with many different other languages to construct a working program in a fairly short period of time. It's cross platform, running on everything*. The CPU overhead is relatively negligible (sans a massive framework like KDE).

    It really astounds me that it's remained so cursory over the past decade or so. We had things like Qtopia way back in '00, and then it kind of went nowhere, even though there have been a lot of promising projects where it's been used - it's just fallen short of dominating like I'd have expected it to have. For instance, it was used in Maemo - but then replaced with something GTK-based. Why?

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  4. Qt: the missed opportunity by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nokia has really shot itself in the foot. They could have pushed the porting effort to get Qt on Android and then get a nice native app ecosystem going but instead they went the (classically) shortsighted take-the-money route with Microsoft. Now they are stuck with this burden called Windows 8 Phone which is on a whooping 4% of cell phones. Windows 8 Phone just needs some apps, right? Well it's bad enough to come into the game late but when you have a hostile environment for developers (developers! developers!) you are not going to get anything but crappy ports from Android or iOS from developers that dont know any better.

    It seems this culture of CEOs/board members coming and going on a regular basis has made corporate investments shortsighted.

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  5. Good Thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is a good thing. The best thing for Qt is for it to be owned by someone whose business depends on it. I worked for a firm that, for legal reasons, had a commercial license from Digia, and I attended the Qt Dev Days in SF in 2011. I was impressed with what I saw. Digia seemed like a good company. I hope they can make a go of it.