Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

16 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. 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 Desler · · Score: 5, Informative

      They've been around for more than 15 years so take that for what you will. There is no guarantees that any company won't go under but they seem solid enough.

    2. 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.

    3. Re:Digia ? by Desler · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Uh huh. Except that many of their commercial licenses are contingent on Linux and Unix support hence why Digia continued to suppirt Linux and Unix platforms that Nokia officially dropped support for.

    4. Re:Digia ? by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Their market cap is only about 50 million euro - significantly less than the 104 million euro Nokia paid for Trolltech back in 2008 and you get the rest of Digia for free. I'd wager that Digia paid less than 10 million for this, with Nokia taking a loss of over 90%, maybe even 99%. The thing is, I don't see who'd buy it today. Apple and Android have their own toolkits on mobile, Microsoft and Apple have their own toolkit on desktop so nobody needs it to sell hardware except maybe RIM. Going back to the dual GPL/commercial licensing model is nearly hopeless now that it's gone LGPL, people will fork off the last release and split the community. It's a nice product but I don't see how you'd make money on it.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    5. 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.

    6. Re:Digia ? by TemporalBeing · · Score: 3, Informative

      Their market cap is only about 50 million euro - significantly less than the 104 million euro Nokia paid for Trolltech back in 2008 and you get the rest of Digia for free. I'd wager that Digia paid less than 10 million for this, with Nokia taking a loss of over 90%, maybe even 99%. The thing is, I don't see who'd buy it today. Apple and Android have their own toolkits on mobile, Microsoft and Apple have their own toolkit on desktop so nobody needs it to sell hardware except maybe RIM. Going back to the dual GPL/commercial licensing model is nearly hopeless now that it's gone LGPL, people will fork off the last release and split the community. It's a nice product but I don't see how you'd make money on it.

      Remember, Nokia bought all of TrollTech. Digia already purchased the Commercial Licensing from Nokia almost a year ago; and now they're purchasing most of the rest - that is, all the stuff that is Qt, but not necessarily all the people. For instance, on the Qt Dev/interest list it was noted they were assuming 125 people from Nokia; of a possible estimate of 150 max - some of which may have already left. And of course the Australian office was already closed by Nokia so they're not assuming that either (though they are getting the quite a bit of the equipment from what I can tell).

      So just because they're only paying a fraction of what Nokia paid does not mean that they are actually paying less than Nokia did overall. You'd have to run the numbers and do a good comparison of what is actually getting transferred. If they are taking a loss, it's probably not much.

      --
      Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
  2. in related news... by bmo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nokia sells patents to a patent troll: suicide by M$ almost complete.

      http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120809005600/en/Vringo-Nokia-Execute-Patent-Purchase-Agreement

    That's it for Nokia....all the talent has left, and now they sold the last real assets to a troll. M$'s trail of destruction continues.

    - credit to phands on IV for pointing this out.

    --
    BMO

  3. rename Digia as Trolltech by mamas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good.

    Now Digia should acquire the Trolltech trademark as well if they haven't, and rebrand themselves as Trolltech. Then everyone could forget Nokia ever happened.

    1. Re:rename Digia as Trolltech by tangent3 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If Nokia never happened, there wouldn't have been an LGPL version of Qt.

  4. Re:1.5years means the deal was made with Microsoft by scorp1us · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It doesn't really matter Qt is under open governance. And if the toolkit is failed to be released, it all goes BSD. So begin that speculation. If MS "killed" Qt, it would free it. MS has two possible position here:
    1. Qt as LGPL or commercial. This limits Qt more than:
    2. Qt as BSD. A top-notch C++ library that runs on all platforms would be competition to .NET.

    I believe that #2 is the worst outcome for MS, especially given their failing position in approval (Win 8, Win Phone). The only benefit to #2 for MS is they can run Qt themselves, but they won't because .NET is their baby.

    --
    Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
  5. 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?

    --
    ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
    1. Re:The greatness of Qt by Desler · · Score: 4, Informative

      How is it 'obscure'? It's widely used in large and small commercial companies worldwide. It might be obscure for an average user but they don't really care about such details.

  6. 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.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  7. 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.

  8. Re:"M$" already gives you off as a neckbeard, but. by TemporalBeing · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Honestly I read his article in Business week where he outlined the logic. The whole thing makes sense. Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware. Balmer wanted the credibility Nokia bought him and had cash. It was a dangerous play but I don't buy it was corrupt. It makes a lot of sense for the board / shareholder's perspective where chewing up the equity and bankruptcy are roughly equivalent.

    Nokia didn't need anything. And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets. They had a credible OS and one they didn't need to pay someone else for. And as someone else pointed out, they were profitable and didn't need the cash. Their ability to remain profitable changed only after they started pursuing Windows at all costs.

    If you want to get an accurate picture of what Microsoft and Stephen Elop did - try reading this blog from a former Nokia Exec that is highly respected in Mobile Phone Sales. You'll see why Nokia is doing so poorly and having to sell off everything, and why Windows Phone will be a no-go (and who made it such).

    --
    Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)