Digia, an ERP firm, buys Qt Commerical Licensing business from Nokia

[GreyGeek]

http://www.digia.com/C2256FEF0043E9C1/0/405002251

Helsinki, Finland 7.3.2011. Digia Plc. (DIG1V) has signed an agreement with Nokia to acquire the Qt commercial licensing and services business. Through the proposed acquisition, around 3500 desktop and embedded customer companies from various industries are targeted to be transferred to Digia. The transaction is expected to be closed by the end of March 2011. Nokia will continue to invest in future development of Qt for the benefit of all users, both Commercial and LGPL.
...
Digia will establish subsidiaries in USA and Norway as part of the transaction.
...
Nokia will continue to invest in developing Qt as a cross-platform framework for mobile, desktop and embedded segments, focusing on open source development and expansion
...
Digia will invest in the development of Qt as a commercial framework. In particular the plan is to emphasize Qt in the desktop and embedded environments and to examine new support models and functionality requests.

This raises some question. Who is actually doing the R&D on Qt? With whom is the QtFree aggreement with?

The announcement says that Nokia will continue to "invest in developing Qt as a cross-platform framework for mobile, desktop and embedded segments, focusing on open source development and expansion" and to "invest in future development of Qt for the benefit of all users, both Commercial and LGPL", BUT Harri Paani, Senior Vice President from Digia, says "We also look forward to driving further the evolution of Qt by bringing in new features and services...".

So, does Digia have commit rights to Nokia's Qt development repositories, or is their "new features" a separate branch? Who does QtFree hold responsible for meeting the agreed "significant improvements" or "version separation" thresholds?

And, that fact that two of Digia's six "partners" are Microsoft and Oracle gives me chills. I hope their already highly traumatic influence on Qt and FOSS does not further chill its progress.

[kc1di]

Re: Digia, an ERP firm, buys Qt Commerical Licensing business from Nokia

interesting questions hope we get some answers soon

[lmilano]

Re: Digia, an ERP firm, buys Qt Commerical Licensing business from Nokia

Microsoft a Partner of Digia? OMG!

Take a look at this article, fresh from today's BBG:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-0...re-accord.html

Microsoft basically bought Nokia and its patent portfolio for just on billion. Just go to www.nokia.com. There is a large banner that reads:

"Nokia + Microsoft. Join the discussion!"

On the bright side, Miguel must be very happy

[GreyGeek]

Re: Digia, an ERP firm, buys Qt Commerical Licensing business from Nokia

Nokia will pay Microsoft a fee for each copy of Windows used in its phones, costs that will be offset as Nokia curtails its own budget for software research and development...

Replace "Nokia" with "Novell", "fee" with "royalty", "Windows" with "SUSE" and you almost have the Novell agreement.

So for $1B Nokia becomes a Win7 OEM with little to no software R&D. Since Symbian was built with Qt that means no Qt R&D, which is contrary to what Nokia said in their "announcement". Do any of these corporations know how to tell the truth any more?

Nokia HAS to make significant changes to Qt within each annual period, and NOT let the difference between Digia's commercial Qt and the GPL version be more than one version, or Qt goes to a BSD style license, something that would terrify Microsoft. I'll wager that Microsoft is betting that it's lawyers can weasel out of the QtFree agreement, or water it down, or simply bluff. I also suspect that the sale of Qt commercial business to Digia, and ALL the other events, were planned from the moment Elop set foot on the Nokia's premises. I wonder how much of the $1B will end up in his pocket. Certainly a LOT more than the $4M in MS stock shares he owns.

I suspect that either/and/or the LGPL & GPL version of Qt will be forked soon.

[lmilano]

Re: Digia, an ERP firm, buys Qt Commerical Licensing business from Nokia

Yes, MS effectively bought a company with a market cap of 32bn for 1bn. Why do I smell a rat? And yes, this is the Novell thing all over.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Digia, an ERP firm, buys Qt Commerical Licensing business from Nokia

After reading additional news releases new questions arise:

KDE Qt Free agreements?
On its news page article Digia says

We also look forward to driving further the evolution of Qt by bringing in new features ..." says Harri Paani, Senior Vice President from Digia.

"...bringing in new [Qt] features..."? can only be done by adding to the code base. Will Digia be employing Qt coders and have access rights to Nokia's Qt repositories or create its own repositories? If so, this raises questions about the KDE Qt Free Agreement, which states "The Foundation has a license agreement with Nokia", NOT Digia, which could continue development of the Qt Commercial version with no obligation to share with Qt Free.

Another little appreciated fact is that the Qt Free agreement does NOT cover Qt for platforms other than Linux. Nokia could remove Windows/Mac versions of Qt without notice and effectively destroy its cross platform capability. IF Microsoft is in control that will be Nokia's next step.

The KDE Foundation cannot fork Qt unless:
1) more than a year has passed since an "important" release of a Qt Free Edition under the Qt Free License.
or
2) more than a year separates the release of the latest Qt and the last Qt Free Edition.
Lawyers will, not doubt, decide what "important" means if the KDE Foundation pushes the issue.

However, the Qt Free Edition is under the LGPL. The Qt Free License includes the right to use the Qt trademarks and branding. But, ANYBODY can take a copy of the LGPL source of Qt, strip its trademarks and branding and release it under another name. Doing that would probably take the better part of a year to get "Kt" back to the condition it was in before the fork. The KDE Foundation doesn't have to hire lawyers to fight Nokia/Microsoft's lawyers if they take the source and fork it into "Kt". That would also leave a way open to keep the tool available on Windows and Mac.