Digia Buys Out Qt From Nokia

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Digia Buys Out Qt From Nokia

Digia has bought out Qt from Nokia. Uh oh?..

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE1NjY

[M1kkko]

Why such a negativity against Digia? Knowing that Nokia has always focused more on mobile devices and less on the Desktop customers of Qt, this can only be a good thing.

Obviously not everyone is happy with Digia's business model and their past Qt Commercial releases carrying large patch deltas against the open-source version ...

For any concerns regarding the large patch deltas, read their explanation which was quoted in another article:

Digia is not in any way carrying a delta on purpose. In actuality, what happens during our release cycle and our patch releases is that we work very closely with Nokia on all releases. Digia focuses, naturally, on all desktop and embedded bugs and additional features while Nokia focuses only on Symbian and mobile-related features. For the LGPL version, it is Nokia that decides what fixes/patches go into the LGPL version, and naturally, they choose bugs/fixes that are for Symbian and mobile. They decide to leave out many desktop and embedded big fixes as their target and focus is on mobile and they need to prioritize those. In turn because Digia’s charter is to service desktop and embedded Qt customers, we need to take in the desktop and embedded fixes/patches that Nokia leaves out because they are crucial for our customers. Digia has no control as to what goes into the LGPL at time of release, only what goes into the Commercial version.

Now that Digia is in full control of Qt, things should only get better.

[RealNC]

Don't forget that Qt was owned by Trolltech in the past, which also was a purely commercial company. At first look, Digia doesn't seem very different then Trolltech in their stakes in Qt; Qt will focus on the platforms used by the clients who pay the bills, just like with Trolltech.

[aavci]

I dont think commercial versions will carry large deltas anymore, since both the commercial and opensource are at one hand.

I think (also hope) this will pretty much be like Trolltech times, only better.

[bwat47]

Don't forget that Qt was owned by Trolltech in the past, which also was a purely commercial company. At first look, Digia doesn't seem very different then Trolltech in their stakes in Qt; Qt will focus on the platforms used by the clients who pay the bills, just like with Trolltech.

Why such a negativity against Digia? Knowing that Nokia has always focused more on mobile devices and less on the Desktop customers of Qt, this can only be a good thing.



For any concerns regarding the large patch deltas, read their explanation which was quoted in another article:



Now that Digia is in full control of Qt, things should only get better.

QFT. This is a good thing. Nokia is a sinking ship that no longer cares about QT, its good to see QT picked up by another company.

[zoomblab]

I hope this means official support for android soon!

[Cyber Killer]

There's a large approval of the situation among many devs that use Qt, as I see on irc and other websites. Also Digia is actually more concerned about the desktop version of Qt, not the mobile one. Personally I also think that this is a really good situation for Qt, going with another company which cares about it, instead of sitting around with Nokia that dies. With Android and iOS official support I think we'll see a large boost to Qt's popularity in the coming months - many devs for these platforms are dissatisfied with the dev tools there and will welcome a new and nice development framework. There's also the case of a large base of developers who picked up Qt in order to write apps for Symbian and MeeGo back when Nokia still pushed those platforms, but those devs moved to Android or iOS when Symbian and MeeGo were shot dead. Now they can come back.

Good times for Qt, are ahead certainly.

[Awesomeness]

Finally. Qt is saved. Nokia can now continue to dig its own grave.

[Jonno]

This means we are almost back to the good old Trolltech days, but not quite (the open source community are actually even better of now). The main differences being (1) The F/OSS version of Qt is LGPL rather than GPL, and (2) the formal decision making authority for the F/OSS version of Qt is the Qt Project, not Digia.

That means that there are likely to continue to be small changes between the LGPL and commercial versions of Qt (as Digia don't have full control over official Qt releases). However, now that Digia is the formal successor in interest of Trolltech, they are contractually bound to, for each Qt Commercial release, make a corresponding release under LGPL within 12 months.

As Digia is already pushing all their patches for Qt Commercial upstream to Qt, this is not likely to make much difference in practice, but it does close a theoretical loophole that would have allowed Digia to keep them proprietary if they had chosen to do so.

[AJSB]

This was kinda already discussed in another thread andreading it back...well kinda ....this can actually...

...be the best thing that could happen to Qt !!!

Yes, there will no more excuses for the Deltas and patch delays...yes, Digia business model is like TTwas....Yes, Nokia was clearly hurting Qt dev/evolution and now is "sleeping with the enemy"....this could ended much worse than it did !!!