Digia Buys Out Qt From Nokia

[Jedibeeftrix]

good result - hope they continue to work closely with RIM as per the announcment.

[GreatEmerald]

125 people? Oh come on, surely they could have bumped the number to 128 and be just that much more classy.

[rohcQaH]

That's really good news.

The most important thing is that many of the full-time Qt developers can continue to work on Qt at digia. If that body of talent and knowledge had been dispersed, that could have been bad. Really bad.

[DrYak]

It would be nice if Linux distribution which use Qt a lot (for example Suse is mostly KDE based, although it supports other environments) try to poach a few of the remaining developers and put them on their own payroll, just to be sure that Qt on the desktop development stays afloat.

No sure if it's possible to happen, but it would bring a little bit more security.

[Awesomeness]

the formal decision making authority for the F/OSS version of Qt is the Qt Project, not Digia.

If that really was the case, the Qt community could decide to use another license, eg “LGPLv2 or later” instead of “LGPLv2 only”.

[n3wu53r]

If that really was the case, the Qt community could decide to use another license, eg “LGPLv2 or later” instead of “LGPLv2 only”.

You know there are probably limits to what open governance can do. Change the license? WHY? It's LGPL, what mroe do you want? BSD so every Qt dev looses their jobs?

Either way Digia buying Qt is a good thing. Much better then Nokia as all they cared about was mobile. Here Digia cares more for embedded and desktop. They will also add iOS and android which Nokia would not do as they are competitors.

[Jonno]

If that really was the case, the Qt community could decide to use another license, eg “LGPLv2 or later” instead of “LGPLv2 only”.

No, because the Qt Project does not own the copyright. What the Qt Project got from Nokia was the right to name releases "Qt" (eg. a trademark license). I.e. The Qt Project decides what gets to be called "Qt", and could theoretically make a “LGPLv2 or later” release named "Qt", but only if they threw away all old code, which obviously won't happen.

[Alejandro Nova]

What *exactly* was sold this time? The copyrights? The right to relicense? The right to all the code?

[shmerl]

These are good news, since Digia will start supporting Qt ports on more platforms, which Nokia ignored out of self interests.

[RealNC]

What *exactly* was sold this time? The copyrights? The right to relicense? The right to all the code?

Copyright of all the code.