The wait is over and the news is out. Digia is to Acquire Qt from Nokia, which includes its trademarks, licensing, software technologies and some developers. Nokia did confuse the wider Qt community earlier this week by letting go of their brisbane team which held an amazing amount of QML talent. It is not known if there will be any moves in trying to re-employ these people for Digia to continue this work.
As part of the Aqusition Announcement Digia was not shy about shouting its intentions to formally take on Android / iOS and Windows 8 platforms as part of the Qt vision of write once and deploy everywhere.
So far Digia seems to be singing the right tune that everyone wants to hear i.e Maintaining the direction and commitment of Qt in both the Commercial and Open Source variations. They see this move as securing Qt’s future as the leading cross-platform development framework.
We also are committed to continuing the special relationship Qt has with the KDE community via the KDE Free Qt Foundation. We believe that this symbiosis is valuable for everyone involved.
Digia looks forward with excitement to the release of 5.0 which is not too far away and also rejoices at its achievement with Qt on INTEGRITY, QNX and VxWorks. Embedded and RTOS (Real Time Operating Systems).
What do you think of the news ?
Press Release:
Helsinki, Finland and Santa Clara, US – August 9th 2012, Digia, the software powerhouse listed on the NASDAQ OMX Helsinki exchange (DIG1V), today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Qt software technologies and Qt business from Nokia. Following the acquisition Digia becomes responsible for all the Qt activities formerly carried out by Nokia. These include product development, as well as the commercial and open source licensing and service business. Following the acquisition, Digia plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms.
One of Digia’s key objectives with this acquisition is to improve its position within the Qt ecosystem by further strengthening Qt’s R&D capabilities and expanding its reach on many more platforms than ever before. Since Digia acquired the Qt Commercial licensing business from Nokia in March 2011, the operation has continued to be successful and has grown substantially. Digia forecasts the acquisition’s impact on its 2012 revenues to be positive. In the following years, Digia forecasts the Qt business to grow. As part of the transaction, a maximum of 125 Qt people from Nokia will transfer to Digia, mostly based in Oslo, Norway and Berlin, Germany. This business transaction will significantly strengthen Digia’s product business and supports Digia’s strategic objective to grow internationally.
Digia encourages all current ecosystem members to continue working on improving Qt with full confidence in Digia’s continued investment to make Qt the leading cross-platform development framework. Digia will work with ecosystem members to secure a successful release of Qt5 and is committed to continuing the Qt Project in order to maintain Qt’s availability under both open source and commercial licenses.
“We are looking forward to welcoming the Qt team to Digia. By adding this world class organization to our existing team we plan to build the next generation leading cross-platform development environment.” said Tommi Laitinen, SVP, International Products, Digia. “Now is a good time for everyone to revisit their perception of Qt. Digia’s targeted R&D investments will bring back focus on Qt’s desktop and embedded platform support, while widening the support for mobile operating systems.”
“Nokia is proud of the contributions we’ve made to Qt over the past four years. We are pleased that we’ve been able to work with Digia to secure continued development of Qt by the current core team,” said Sebastian Nyström, head of Nokia Strategy. “Digia’s plans to acquire Qt mean that it can continue as a successful open source project and also offer continuing employment for many people in the community.”
Qt has been used by over 450,000 developers and thousands of leading companies worldwide in over 70 industries to power the most innovative, mission-critical and renowned applications and UIs. Qt Commercial is a leader in a number key market segments including automotive, medical, advanced visualization & animation, industrial automation and aerospace & defense. In the future, Digia expects that Qt will have a key role bringing world-class user experience and user interfaces to embedded systems and consumer electronics.
Source Digia Oyj
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