Investment in Qt planned to continue @ Digia

Though the Qt community is larger than any one company or group of people, Nokia is proud of the contributions we’ve made to the development of Qt over the past four years. Since we acquired Trolltech, we’ve modernized Qt for a new generation of user interfaces, grown the Qt community to more than 450,000 developers and have shipped Qt on close to 200 million devices, including the Nokia 808 PureView.

However, as you may already have seen, Nokia is sharpening its strategy. This has meant making a number of tough choices, including that Qt will not be used in future Nokia products.

Since we made that announcement, we’ve been actively looking to secure the future for Qt, both as an open source project and a community, serving both commercial and open licensees. As a result of those efforts, Digia has today announced its plans to acquire the Qt technology, copyright, and trademarks, as well as to transfer a number of Qt people from Nokia. We believe that, with this planned acquisition, we have found the best possible solution for the continued success of Qt.

We’re very pleased that Digia is taking this step. Digia is already very active in the Qt community and acquired Nokia’s Qt Commercial business during the first half of 2011. We believe, it now has the muscle to contribute and drive this community. Digia’s planned acquisition would provide a future for Qt. As part of this planned transaction, Digia has also committed that it would be happy to continue the open source Qt Project and meet the obligations of the KDE Free Qt Foundation licensing agreement.

Of course, some of us involved with Qt might have mixed emotions about this news. Though Qt will not be a part of future Nokia products, we’re happy that the development of Qt is to continue outside of Nokia and that the transaction would offer career continuity for many Nokia colleagues.

We expect that the planned acquisition, which is subject to customary closing conditions, will be completed during Q3, 2012. On behalf of all my Nokia colleagues, I thank all of you in the Qt community for your support and wish you every success for the future.

Sebastian Nyström