Nokia sells off remaining Qt assets
August 21, 2012 —
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After four years of effort, Nokia has given up on Qt. The company's attempts to mold Qt into a mobile platform and framework have clearly been deemed a failure, as evidenced by its layoff of hundreds in Brisbane, Australia, and its sale of the remaining Trolltech and Qt assets to third-party Qt development firm Digia.
Juhapekka Niemi, director of Qt at Digia, said that the company plans to continue innovating the framework, and to push forward around desktop and mobile device support. He also added that Digia had purchased the commercial service and support business for Qt from Nokia in 2010, and that the success of that acquisition was part of the reason for this purchase from Nokia of the rest of the Qt assets.
“I think, overall, the acquisition is a good thing, especially because when Nokia announced their strategy in June, the last couple of months were a time of uncertainty,” he said. “We hope to launch Qt 5 soon, in the next couple of months. I think, also, this announcement was for people working on Qt 5: They now understand what the future holds for them.”
With this purchase, however, the company will now take over development duties on Qt, and will become the keeper of the project as a whole.
“We definitely believe the cross-platform strategy is the future for Qt. We will continue to invest in the desktop, and we support Android and iOS. The Android port is used pretty extensively today, and we hope to make it better,” said Niemi.
He went on to state that the existing dual-license model for selling support for Qt will continue to exist. “We believe in the dual-licensing model. We see huge benefits on the open-source side, and we see the value for the commercial license. We are very much in favor of those models. We will work with the Qt ecosystem and partners,” he said.
No matter what Digia plans to do with Qt, Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst with Forrester, said that the move away from Nokia is probably a good thing, overall, for Qt.
Related Search Term(s): Digia, Nokia, Qt
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