That Was Quick: Nokia Sells Qt Commercial To Digia

Following the announcement less than a month ago that Nokia and Microsoft were hooking up over Windows Phone 7 and that Qt and MeeGo would take a back-seat at Nokia, it's being announced this morning that the Qt commercial licensing business has been sold. The purchaser of the Qt commercial side is Digia.

It was only back in 2008 that Nokia bought out the Norwegian trolls. They then renamed Trolltech to Qt Software and kept developing things although they had stopped developing Qt Jambi and made some other changes, but overall for the past three years Nokia was a nice steward to the Qt community. However, now that Nokia is in bed with Microsoft, they are offloading these Nordic assets.

The announcement this morning is that Digia is acquiring Nokia's Qt commercial licensing business. "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 is a publicly traded Finnish company that focuses upon flexible business solutions, mobile solutions, and customer experience management via consulting services, contract engineering, digital services, business intelligence, etc. Digia has worked with Qt already for years so hopefully they don't end up screwing things up.

According to this Nokia Qt blog post, Nokia will continue to play a role within the Qt community. "Nokia and the Digia already have a close relationship and will cooperate in improving Qt as well as in creating developer events, new demos etc...Although Digia will now be responsible for issuing all Qt Commercial software licenses and for providing dedicated services and support to licensees, Nokia’s Qt technical support team will support and work closely with Digia for the next year. We will now begin work with Digia to ensure a smooth transition of all licenses and commercial relationships."

We want to emphasize our long-term commitment to Qt. Nokia will drive Qt developments in support of our business needs and our investments in community building, marketing and R&D will continue to benefit all members of the Qt community. By introducing the up-coming open governance model we will also enable other companies, such as Digia, to more easily contribute to Qt, which will enrich Nokia investments in Qt and benefit and grow the Qt community as a whole.

Overall I expect that Qt Commercial software licensees and the entire Qt community including all of our Qt Partners will benefit from this change. We will continue to actively support the Qt community – including MeeGo – as we are today in activities such as active developer engagement through our online community site, events, community sponsorship and code sprints. We will also continue to provide training materials and eLearning, Qt certification exams and enhance our Qt Partner, Qt in Education and marketing programs and much more.

Fortunately for the community, it was Trolltech back in 2008 that committed to the GPLv3 license for Qt and in 2009 there was the LGPL option.