Nokia Sells Qt

Google85 writes "Now that Nokia has shifted to a Windows Phone-centric smartphone strategy, it's only natural for the company to divest itself of responsibility with regard to the Qt framework. It has been announced Digia will acquire the Qt commercial licensing and services business from Nokia, including the transfer of some 3,500 desktop and embedded customers actively using Qt today."

They sort of had to

[tomhudson]

... while they still could. There was a "poison pill" [nokia.com] in the QT acquisition

(For those of you who don’t know what it is, the KDE Free Qt Foundation is what we call a “poison pill” for Trolltech: should we ever stop releasing open source versions of Qt, the foundation is given the right to unilaterally release the last version of Qt under the BSD license.

So, why not get some $$$ while you can, right?

Nokia did not sell Qt

[rminsk]

Nokia did not sell Qt to Digia. They sold the Qt commercial license business to Digia. Digia will now sell Qt licenses to companies like Adobe or Google who want to make closed-source modifications to Qt. Development of Qt itself will remain inside Nokia. Nokia will continue to develop Qt.

Re:Wow, that was fast

[olliM]

I guess in the spirit of fairness you should also link to the qt blog post detailing this sale: Nokia and Digia working together to grow the Qt community [nokia.com]

Re:So much for plan B...

[Gubbe]

Elop already sold [reuters.com] all MS stock and bought 150K Nokia stock on 17th of February.

Re:So much for plan B...

[JabberWokky]

Well, Nokia still owns Qt... Digia is only handling the commercial software licensing and professional services for Qt. Basically, Digia are licensed to sell the product, but Nokia still owns and develops it in-house.

Not exactly going "all in".

Response from David Stone @ Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi all
Here are a few points that might add clarity.

Nokia did not 'sell Qt'. It selected a partner to sell commercial licenses and support services, a task that is currently done by Nokia. Qt is offered under two licenses - commercial and LGPL - and the large (majority in fact) base of non commercial users are not impacted by this change.

The agreement lets Nokia focus on Qt for its core businesses, and ensures Qt commercial customers - mainly in the desktop and embedded space - are given top service by a company that has commercial Qt licensing at the core of its interests.

The development of Qt has not been sold or outsourced and is not impacted by this change. Nokia's commitment to advancing and developing Qt for all Qt users has not changed - it remains commited.

You can read some more details at http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/07/nokia-and-digia-working-together

Regards
David Stone
Communications Manager, Qt

Re:search terms = microsoft digia

[Anonymous Coward]

Digia is just a quite generic Finnish integrator / consulting company with a large mobile division (relatively speaking) and some own products that they sell mostly domestically e.g Progress based ERP and mobile company phonebook with multiplatform support. They do partner with about any main stream software vendor like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM or Progress. I do not think they are particularly evil unless they got paid big time for being one.

Strange think is that Digia bought QT licencing business as they do not have that much international businesses (especially outside mobile). I guess they got very good deal (close to free) while Nokia got out of a business that was not supporting Nokia's own goals. Think about 3500 customers that Nokia couldn't sell anything else directly.

disclaimer, I used to work for Digia