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POW! Digia straps Qt into ejector seat, gleefully pulls handle

'Fly, my pretties' or 'Son, you're on your own'?

From Trolltech to Nokia and Nokia to Digia, the application framework Qt has had a challenging corporate life even though it retained fans among developers. Now, the language's next phase of life has begun in earnest, spun out of Digia into a separate subsidiary tasked with bringing the commercial and open source Qts back into alignment.

While Digia puts an upbeat spin on the separation, it's hard to avoid wondering if, like Trolltech and Nokia before it, the company has found it hard to reconcile the coexistence of the open source and commercial versions of the platform.

It said as much in August, noting that “The installers and product packages for the open source and enterprise versions are different, and there is a complete disconnect between qt-project.org and the commercial pages on qt.digia.com” when it announced its intention to create the subsidiary.

Digia holds 100 per cent of the new Qt company at this point, and said one of the aims of the new operation will be to unify the two sets of packages, starting with one set of installers.

The first step of the creation of a new Qt has now gone live, and a few days ago the unified operation popped its head up at the IBC conference in Amsterdam to position its capabilities as a set-to-box and digital TV UI development environment.

Code releases are continuing, with the latest, Qt 5.3.2, wrapping Qt Creator 3.2.1 in the same package.

That includes a new licensing tier for independent mobile developers: a €20 / US$25 per month subscription giving developers access to the Qt libraries, Qt creator, a commercial Qt license, and develop/deploy access to Android stores, the App Store, and Windows Marketplace. ®

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