Qt sold from Nokia to Digia
 

Nokia has sold Qt to Digia.

http://www.digia.com/en/Home/Company...Qt-from-Nokia/

Do you think that this will change anything for end-users of qt? And if It will then it will be for better or worse?

I treat this as tentatively good news.

I don't imagine the transfer can make anything worse in the near term. Nokia is imploding and turning MSEvil, and I was a bit concerned about the status of qt because of it. I'm relieved to hear that at least it's now in the hands of a stable(?) company that appreciates its value.

Here's a link to a semi-official quote. It looks like they intend to keep it business-as-usual for now, at least.

http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2012/08/09/...The+Qt+Blog%29

Worse comes to worst, Digia may eventually try to disrupt or eliminate its development support for the FOSS Qt Project and take it fully proprietary, at which point some open source group will almost certainly fork the code. That may slow it down, but I doubt it will kill it.

I don't think it will make any difference at all.

I'm a KDE user that's why I'm concerned about this. I hope that Digia will never close development for LGPL version of qt. By the way, they seem to have done quite a good bussiness.

So it's like going back to Trolltech times where Qt was run by a small independent company. For Qt itself (not necessarily free Qt) it's at least not worse than its current state. Compared to the times when Nokia was committed to Qt the things are somewhat worse cause Nokia was interested in popularizing the Qt technology for free as it was intended to make money on hardware products and not Qt itself and it had lots of resources for that. It really created a lot of buzz around Qt and increased the openness of the library. Still those times are gone. It's unlikely that Digia will close source Qt as it will mostly kill it. Open source development is a huge part of the Qt ecosystem and contributes a lot into testing, bugfixing, and even platform development itself (think of Phonon).

p.s. I'm more concerned about Nokia's huge patent portfolio on mobile technologies. It's not Apple's patents on round cornered boxes with shiny icons and such stuff. It's the patents any cell phone can hardly exist without. If Microsoft gets its grip on it there might be not a single chance for any usable open mobile OS.

Well, My Nephew is looking for work. He is/was based at Trolltech in Brisbane/Aust programming with QT for nokia (games).

Who knows, we will see later.