After the acquisition of Qt from Nokia, Digia’s director of R&D, Tuukka Turunen has sent an open letter to the KDE Community members. Below is the full text of the letter showing the commitment that Digia has to Qt.
Dear KDE Community,
As you may have heard, Digia announced it plans to acquire the Qt technology from Nokia. This transaction secures Qt’s future as the leading cross-platform development framework. It also brings over a part of the Qt team previously at Nokia who, together with the Digia Qt R&D team, will be able to keep developing Qt further.
With this acquisition Digia will be the main company responsible for all of Qt, not just the commercial licensing business. We believe in the power of the Qt dual license. It is a great value for Qt that it can be used under an open source and commercial license. We want to continue the symbiosis with the KDE community and the KDE Free Qt Foundation.
Digia will take forth operating the Qt Project, including hosting the key systems via the Qt Project Foundation. It is very important for us to have a growing number of contributions from different members of the Qt community. We want to work with the entire Qt ecosystem through the Qt Project to make sure Qt will continue to thrive both under commercial and open-source licenses.
Continuing the development of Qt is both a challenge and an opportunity. It will be on the mutual shoulders of the community and Digia to secure the future of Qt as the best possible cross- platform development framework, a challenge we are ready to take on. The KDE community is a key driver and contributor to Qt and we therefore would like to further develop our relationship with you, via an even stronger dialogue and cooperation in the future.
We will continue the work originally set forth by Trolltech over 15 years ago to develop a framework that allows to write code once and deploy it everywhere. We will carry on improving Qt so that both our customers and the open-source users can rely on Digia’s continued investment to provide a development framework that will make their projects successful. We look forward to working with KDE in order to further strengthen and extend Qt’s global reach.
In about a month, the legalities of the acquisition will be concluded. Prior to that, we want to plan things together with you and other key stakeholders of the Qt community. We want to discuss and agree on the future of Qt so that we can all work efficiently together after the transaction is completed.
Yours,
Tuukka Turunen
Director, R&D
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