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Digia To Acquire Qt From Nokia
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."
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.
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.
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BMO
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.