Nokia Reportedly Selling Off Qt | Hacker News Reader

Nokia Reportedly Selling Off Qt

phoronix.com

88 pointsmacco42 comments

I'm glad that Nokia have decided to do this. I understand that it might be financially motivated, but given that they've made a bet on the Windows platform, it's a nicer move than just mothballing the whole thing and eventually shutting it down.

http://www.phonenews.com/nokia-closing-qt-australia-office-q...

I wonder who will be a candidate for buying it, depends how much Nokia will want to offload it for.

I'd bet on RIM if they still have enough cash. They also integrate QT for their next platform (if it ever gets to see the light of day)

I think they already have their work cut out of their next platform without throwing yet another integration into it.

Its not "yet another integration", Qt is already the base component of their Cascades framework which is RIM's preferred way of building BB10 apps.

Google has used it for some client apps (Earth, MusicManager). Skype uses it (though post-MS that seems subject to change). Intel already employs some of the senior Qt people.

I think the most likely resting place will be a non-profit of some sort along the lines of the Mozilla foundation.

There is already a nonprofit reponsible for the project infrastructure.

http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/12/qt-project/

And a governeance model that looks open to the community.

http://qt-project.org/wiki/The_Qt_Governance_Model

I think Perforce should buy it.

And bring back P4Win :)

Embarc.. (oh, whoever owns Delphi right now, hard to even spell) who's been struggling for multiplatform solutions for some time.

Though I'd not bet on it. Their management seems to have made all the wrong decisions in product development in the last 10+ years and has ridden Delphi, a platform which was always way ahead of its time, into irrelevance.

Embarcadero Technologies (not so foreign a word in California: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarcadero_%28San_Francisco%29)

Keep in mind that Nokia already sold off the commerical licensing rights to QT. I'm not sure how a sale would affect that.

http://www.digia.com/en/Qt/

Yep, Troll Tech (the company behind Qt before Nokia bought them) was making an annual revenue of about 25M€. I'm supposing this was partly licensing, and partly support and training

http://blogs.kde.org/node/3235/

With the licensing business gone through move to LGPL licensing and the Digia deal it would at least be hard to make Qt a business on its own again. So the probable acquirers are companies that are building products on Qt, like RIM or maybe some of the big embedded players. Intel would also be a possibility, I imagine.

Autodesk - Maya, MotionBuilder, etc. - all based on Qt Sony uses it, at least the tools I've seen from them. Probably lots of other big companies do, but somehow avoid or it's too cheap for them to use it. I'm still puzzled how they were able to survive that long...

Would it help Google if they bought it as their own dev tool for Android? Something like Apple's own Xcode? Or are the incompatibilities too great to bother with it?

Someone already ported Qt to android along with Qt Creator integration, all-in-one installer, and a Qt library packaging system for your apps. Appears to be in development still.

(edit) project page: http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/

blog post: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/

> Or are the incompatibilities too great to bother with it?

Yes. Also Google already has multiple development platforms, including one for Android (two, if you count Java and C++ Android development separately, they do have separate development kits).

Qt could provide a GUI toolkit for C++ on Android.

Last I checked, native apps on Android were limited to raw OpenGL.

That would still require some sort of NDK backend for the Qt toolkit, since X11 is not compatible with the native Android windowing system. I'd imagine that's no small feat.

Well Qt doesn't require X11. Qt's backends are actually VERY flexible, essentially all you need to do is provide it with a 2D drawing surface in most cases.

There is already an Android port of Qt in progress here, with a lot of things (including Qt Quick and QWidgets) already working: http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/ Several apps using Qt have already been published in Google Play.

Well Qt is simply a C++ API and as such can become a standard part of the Android NDK if Google chooses.

Since Google sees the NDK as something that is only intended for legacy code, games or performance hotspots, I doubt that.

I also hope Qt can get into Android. Qt is the best C++ api.

Unless there's some compelling reason to prefer Qt Creator over Eclipse, I'm guessing not.

On the other hand, the current Eclipse SDK does have a pretty compelling advantage over Qt Creator: it's already written and working. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

> working

From my personal experience, I'd have to say that's highly debatable.

What are some good examples of successful large framework mergers? I can't think of any off the bat. It all sounds good in theory until you try to look at it in practice. 2 different languages, 2 different ways of doing everything -- graphics, networking, logging, etc. I like Qt and I like Android API but not sure how they two can live side by side without stepping on each other's toes or detracting attention.

Rails and Merb?

qt creator would be a great tool for developing google nacl(native client) applications rather than android I guess. I know there is already some work done for qt to work with nacl apis. http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt_for_Google_Native_Client

Nokia sold the Qt licensing business over a year ago. The remainder was in the offing as soon as the Windows deal went down.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/07/nokia-sells-qt/

Had a friend who saw the warning signs and bailed early enough. Queensland (the state Brisbane is in) recently had it's government shed tens of thousands of workers in a bid to reduce debt. Seems to be a great time to be hiring talent in Brisbane?

I wonder what this will mean for the future of headless browsers built on Qt WebKit, e.g. PhantomJS.

I had no idea Qt was used for that.

https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/tree/master/src/qt

They didn't mention it in their readme at least.

I also use it for wkhtmltopdf http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/ , is the only decent solution that works with javascript pages and from almost all languages : python , ruby , php

We're also using Qt for controlling our info displays: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/qt-air-cursor/

?!?! Didn't this happend already last year or so. They sold it to Digia iirc.

They only sold the commercial licensing: http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/07/nokia-sells-qt-licensing-...

The actual development of Qt has still mainly been happening at Nokia, though with an increasing number of outside contributors thanks to the new governance model: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2012/01/10/qt-4-moved-to-open-gover...

Thanks for clearing things up.

but, but -- Qt moved to an open-source model a year ago.

qt-project.org

Sad qt was a really good framework and excellent use of c++

Do they have any more feet to shoot?

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