Nokia sells Qt commercial software licensing business to Digia

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 08 March 2011 07:42

IT Industry - Strategy

Nokia has sold the commercial licensing business of its Qt mobile software development platform to Finnish software company Digia, claiming that professional services are not core business.

Nokia attempted to play down the significance of the announcement, but it will do little to reassure the Qt development community that already feels abandoned following Nokia's announcement of an alliance with Microsoft and plans to develop future apps in Windows Mobile 7 and its future incarnations.

If Nokia is to realise its stated goal of selling another 150 million Symbian based smartphones, and making a success of its MeeGo platform, it will need the developer community to remain loyal to the Qt developer platform in the wake of it teaming up with Micorsoft.

Nokia attempted to play down the sale. It did not issue a press release, instead relying on a posting on its official blog, headed "Nokia and Digia working together to grow the Qt community" that took until the end of the fourth paragraph reveal that this "working together" was a euphemism for the sale of the Qt commercial software licensing and professional services business to Digia.

The blog opened by trying to reassure the Qt community that it would "continue to benefit for years to come from further Nokia investment in Qt, primarily focused on areas such as Qt Quick, Qt WebKit and HTLM5 in addition to the ongoing work of improving performance and stability."

According to Nokia, "The success of Qt has in part been due to a successful dual-license model, providing open LGPL and commercial license alternatives which have enabled a dynamic community of developers in 70 industries to drive a rapid evolution of the Qt cross-platform application and UI framework. The Qt Commercial licensing business is growing and has around 3500 companies, whose development and use of Qt benefits the whole community."

CONTINUED