Nokia straps Qt into ejector seat and hits the shiny red button
App factory caught by new owner Digia
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Nokia's back-room clear out continues with the Qt platform being sold to Finnish firm Digia Oyj for an undisclosed sum. As part of the deal 125 engineers will swap employers.
Digia was a licensee of Qt, distributing commercial and freeware versions of the platform and development tools, but now it owns the whole shebang.
Qt was created by Trolltech more than 15 years ago, and is a cross-platform framework for building software. It supports C++ and other languages, and can be used to cross-compile graphical (and command-line) applications to Windows, Mac and various flavours of Unix as well as Symbian and MeeGo - which is why Nokia bought Trolltech back in 2008 for a shade under a hundred million quid.
But Nokia is focused entirely on Windows Phone now, so has been shuttering its Qt development efforts around the world and has now divested itself of the technology entirely.
Not that Qt will die - Digia claims there are almost half a million Qt developers out there. The platform is used for some high-profile applications including the VLC's Videolan Media Player, Google Earth and Mathematica. Digia is promising support for Android and iOS as well as continued support for embedded platforms including QNX (the foundation for the latest RIM OS) and VxWorks (which is doing such sterling work on Mars at the moment).
The support sites for the Qt Project will also transfer to Digia, as will the Qt Project Foundation, but Digia isn't planning any changes and even reckons the transition won't affect the launch of Qt 5 which is due later this month.
With all its eggs in one Microsoft-branded basket Nokia might not be interested in cross-platform development any more, but there are plenty of people who are. Nokia ploughed a lot of money into improving Qt, so it will be interesting to see how the framework develops without it. ®
COMMENTS
@RICHTO
"Dead and dying MeGo [sic] and Symbian crap"?
Your comment implies that Nokia ditched MeeGo because it was dying, whereas the truth is that they buried two innovative and commercially successful/viable platforms, then killed them. If Harmattan had been given the promotion that Nokia's WP mess has been given, there's no telling what could have been achieved. I think you know how disingenuous your comment is.
Further, your link (http://betanews.com/2012/08/03/android-leads-ios-follows-windows-phone-shows-surprising-growth/) talks about WP shipments, not sales. If I'm willing to waste enough money, I can ship any amount of anything to anyone anywhere; doesn't mean much, though. Shame that consumers aren't really biting, even with the massive discounting on Nokia Lumia.
Your homework: which sold more in the 3 months on the market: the wildly over-promoted Lumia, or the buried-before-during-and-after-release N9, which wasn't even released in many countries?
Note: "sold" here takes its traditional meaning, i.e. "a consumer voluntarily handed over their cash in return for taking the device away and using it", not s"some marketing budget got moved around, some incentives were given, some lies were told and someone blogged about the whole process".
No rush. I think you know the answer, but go ahead and post more fail if you've got nothing better to do.
Re: Excellent news!
I guess qt passed the ultimate hardcore benchmark, being owned by Nokia idiots and not dying.
I am not being sarcastic or joking, I was a Nokia/ symbian user just until last year.
Re: The ex-MS-beancounter Trojan Horse is doing its hitjob...
> They ditched that dead and dying MeGo and Symbian crap
The only reason those are dying is because they were ditched. In particular the N9 was still outselling Nokia WP7 even when it was not promoted and only available in certain countries.
> the best mobile platform that there is
A platform that is now dead, just like WM6.x was previously. No WP7 phone will get WP8. WP8 is yet another new platform running on different hardware and using different development, just like WM6 was killed by WP7.
> before any one else large got a look in.
HTC, Samsung, LG, etc. In what way are these not 'large'. They were selling WP7 before Elop went to Nokia.
> Windows Phone already sells 20% of the volume of the iphone
I did notice that the announcement it claimed:
"in the second quarter, the company doubled the sales of Lumia smarpthones, from 2 million in first quarter to 4 million".
That looks like weasel words to me. is that 4m in q2 or 4m total of q1 + q2 ? It is also likely that these sales came at the expense of the other WP7 makers.
> not bad for a new OS
WP7 isn't 'new', it has been around 2 years and is now dead.
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