thelinuxlink.net

"Espoo, Finland and Oslo, Norway , 28 January - 2008 - Nokia and Trolltech ASA today announced that they have entered into an agreement that Nokia will make a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com), a company headquartered in Oslo, Norway and publicly listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. Trolltech is a recognized software provider with world-class software development platforms and frameworks. In addition to the key software assets, its talented team will play an important role in accelerating the implementation of Nokia’s software strategy."

Source: Nokia to acquire Trolltech to accelerate software strategy.

"Open letter to KDE and the Open Source community - Joint announcement

Nokia and Trolltech have today announced that we have agreed that Nokia will make a
public tender offer to acquire Trolltech. Trolltech's management and board of directors
support Nokia's offer. We felt it was important to directly inform you about this and to
start an open dialog.

We will continue to actively develop Qt and Qtopia. We also want to underline that we
will continue to support the open source community by continuing to release these
technologies under the GPL.

Trolltech has benefited greatly from the feedback the community has been providing
while using Qt to develop free software. We respect the symbiotic relationship Qt has
with the community and we wish to continue and enhance this relationship.

This acquisition is still in a very early stage and as such we do not yet have all of the
answers. In the coming weeks, Nokia and Trolltech employees will form a working group
to identify ways of further improving our relationship with the open source community.
We would appreciate your comments and ideas on how to achieve this at
opensource@trolltech.com.

Nokia is committed to continue Trolltech’s current open source engagements, including
honoring the KDE Free Qt agreement, and we will seek to strengthen our support of KDE
in the future. As a first step Nokia will apply to become a Patron of KDE*.



Sincerely,

Haavard Nord, CEO and co-founder, Trolltech

Eirik Chambe-Eng, Chief Troll and co-founder, Trolltech

Lee Williams, Senior Vice President, Nokia

For more information about Nokia’s involvement in the open source community, please
see: http://www.opensource.nokia.com

* More information on the Patrons of KDE can be found here:
http://ev.kde.org/supporting-members.php"

Source: Open letter to KDE and the Open Source community - Joint announcement.


Now this I didn't expect! But anyway, much rather Nokia than some bastard company who's all about proprietary software.

This is interesting news. The N800 line uses Maemo (which is GTK+ based). I know a lot of their cell phones currently use Symbian and other closed frameworks (including their own). Maybe this is cheaper than continually licensing Symbian. Nokia may be looking to expand it's foot hold in the cell and embedded markets. Look for more licensing deals involving qtopia. This deal kinda makes sense.

i am being on the paranoid side , what if Nokia decide to make Q 5.x , 6.x and so on non-free?
we are going be back to the early days of when there was only gnome for a desktop environment.
As much as Qt 4.x is great now , in 10 years time its going become stale.

allix wrote:i am being on the paranoid side , what if Nokia decide to make Q 5.x , 6.x and so on non-free?
we are going be back to the early days of when there was only gnome for a desktop environment.

Since the agreement between the KDE Free Qt Foundation and Trolltech does not specify a specific version, I assume KDE could release Qt 5.x/6.x as well under the three-clause BSD license.

allix wrote:As much as Qt 4.x is great now , in 10 years time its going become stale.

Then GTK would have been stale five years ago! Even IF Trolltech discontinued Qt 4.x, KDE could just maintain it themselves.


However, this whole thing is irrelevant, Nokia and Trolltech have already issued a joint statement (Quoted in my original post) saying they are committed to maintaining the GPL licensing of Qt. Also, Nokia aren't new to free software / open source at all: http://opensource.nokia.com.

Tsuroerusu wrote: Then GTK would have been stale five years ago! Even IF Trolltech discontinued Qt 4.x, KDE could just maintain it themselves.

Now Now , we are all aware that GTK technically sucks compared to QT

allix wrote:

Tsuroerusu wrote: Then GTK would have been stale five years ago! Even IF Trolltech discontinued Qt 4.x, KDE could just maintain it themselves.

Now Now , we are all aware that GTK technically sucks compared to QT

That was not my point, my point was that even IF Trolltech did not release Qt 5.x (When it eventually comes around, because Qt 4 has many years left in it!) under the GPL, the community would just continue the development of Qt 4.x! I made a reference to GTK, because it is a community project, and it's definitely not stale, and Qt would not be either, even if Trolltech turned troll on us.

However, in any case, I don't think you have to worry.