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Future of Qt Split: Nokia Sells Commercial Services
Nokia Corp. announced on Monday that technical services provider Digia PLC will acquire all commercial licensing and services for the Qt application and UI framework, its primary platform for Symbian and MeeGo (Maemo) development. The financial terms of the deal, expected to become final by the end of March, remain undisclosed.
The agreement comes in the wake of the announcement in February of a strategic global partnership between Nokia and Microsoft centered on smartphones running the new Windows Phone operating system. Windows Phone applications are developed using Silverlight for Windows Phone or the XNA gaming framework.
The Microsoft partnership has caused the Qt developer community to question the future of Symbian, MeeGo and the longstanding open source framework, whose copyright is owned by Nokia. The company acquired Qt developer Trolltech in 2008 for $153 million, and released its first APIs last September. Since the Microsoft announcement, Nokia is widely perceived as backing away from Symbian and MeeGo, despite its estimated 200 million Symbian users and projections of sales of 150 million Symbian devices in the next few years. Nokia has yet to release a MeeGo mobile device, but the company has indicated that only one is on the roster for 2011. MeeGo is expected to continue as an open source project.
The Qt cross-platform, C++ framework is promoted as a way to create source code that can run on mobile, embedded and desktop operating systems. Nokia, which primarily focused on Qt for mobile platforms, has indicated that it will continue to invest in the framework, particularly Qt Quick – a new Qt UI Creation Kit, Qt Webkit and HTML5. The company released Qt Quick, the Qt SDK 1.1 beta and Qt 4.7.2 earlier this month. The Qt framework is available commercially and since 2009, under the open GNU Lesser General Public License (LPGL).
Nokia counts 3500 commercial customers for Qt, which will be transferred to Digia. As part of the agreement, Digia, which operates in Finland, China, Russia and Sweden, is opening subsidiaries in the United States and Norway. The company also announced plans to hire 19 people from Nokia's existing technical support and sales organizations. According to Nokia, that represents only about 10 percent of its current Qt workforce.
Nokia began searching for a commercial services partner in 2010 and Digia won out, explained Nokia Vice President Sebastian Nystrom, who heads MeeGo, Qt and Webkit, in a blog posting on Monday:
"Employing hundreds of Qt experts, Digia has 7 years experience in providing top-class Qt competence, and is dedicated to continue and grow Qt Commercial relationships as well as to contribute innovation to the overall Qt LGPL and commercial community."
Digia will focus more on desktop and embedded environments. The company will also offer support for older platforms that were not supported by Nokia. Both companies will work together for the next year to ensure a smooth transition for commercial customers.
Nystrom explained Nokia's role going forward:
"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."
The Qt repository is hosted on Gitourious. An alpha of a Qt port to Android codenamed Necessitas became available on SourceForge in late February.
About the Author
Kathleen Richards is the editor of RedDevNews.com and executive editor of Visual Studio Magazine.