Qt-interest Archive, January 2008
Nokia to acquire Trolltech
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Message 16 in thread
auba@xxxxxxx wrote:
>> Nokia and Trolltech have just 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.
>
> I can't feel any happyness... what will happen to the sources of QT? What will
> happen to the Trolltech Team? What about KDE?
> - and will will happen to *us*?
>
http://trolltech.com/28012008/28012008-opensourceletter
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Message 17 in thread
> We felt it was important to
> directly inform you about this.
Indeed. This is very unsettling news.
I've read the open letter, but it failed to address my major concerns:
- will Trolltechs focus shift to Qtopia, meaning that support for Qt
will dwindle?
- does Nokia have any interest at all to keep dual-licensing Qt?
- i'm sure open source Qt will survive, but i'm very concerned about
commercial Qt.
- i'm afraid new investments probably can't offset the assumed shift of
focus to Qtopia, as you can only slowly expand the team if you want to
keep the level of code quality.
- the statement "There will be further investments in Qt and Qtopia and
an even better long-term security in your decision to choose Trolltech
for your business." sounds very ironic to me given the above stated
points.
However, i can only congratulate Nokia for a clever move:
They kind of fell behind in their mobile "look&feel" and usability in
the last years, while 5 years or so ago they were the company with the
easiest-to-use mobiles. Qtopia will most certainly help fix this. I'm
sure Trolltech will be a very valuable acquirement for Nokia. I'm just
not so sure what this will mean to the rest of the customers :-(
Best regards,
Peter
(a very satisfied customer so far)
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Message 18 in thread
Unfortunately said, gnome developers targeted quite often this situation in
flamewars between kde/gnome users. They claimed that such situation can
happen and that tight cooperation of commercial organization and linux can
never work due to different priorities. Truth is, that GTK is free of such
links thus makes its usage in the projects less problematic (regardless
whether we like the outlook or coding-style or not - i'm definitely not a
gtk fan). I think that in this situation the easiest way - if possible - is
to make a fork of QT libraries. In fact - this is what kdelibs4 is
(portable, qt-like). The issue here is for commercial customers. When QT is
forked, imho they would be forced at least partially open the code for their
projects due to license change (if possible, i have never developed under qt
commercial license)
Message 19 in thread
Dear developers at Trolltech,
before you decide please think.
When will it happen that the Norwegian salaries for developing QT are to
expensive for Nokia's shareholders? At nokia this means that the costs in
Norway may not exceed some percentage of the whole QT-branch in Nokia.
Two years, three years?
I bet they are already setting up development resources in India or China to
continue developing QT in *the Nokia way*.
So it will be just a question of time when the offices in Norway will be
closed.
Eckhard
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Message 20 in thread
> As far as I know your native companies doing the same, so I don't understand
> why Nokia is this the worst from the worst...
He didn't say that - he's got an opinion, he is a user, he tells it.
> Anyway... this group is not for such discussions.
I don't think that "qt-interest" implies the restriction to technical Qt-issues.
Regards,
Erik
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Message 21 in thread
RafaÅ Cygnarowski wrote:
> [...]
> As far as I know your native companies doing the same, so I don't
> understand
> why Nokia is this the worst from the worst...
> [...]
That does not mean I'm going to support this in any way. I'd like to see
companies to take ethical responsibility. And Nokia (as well as many others)
don't do that.
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Message 22 in thread
Hi,
for me this big step is very alarming. Nokia is known for very unethical descisions and they don't
cope for the community as Trolltech does.
The history of acqusitions teaches us that acquisitions mostly only have the aim to bring more
money and often lead to the dismantling of the formerly good working and solid company.
For me as (german) customer Trolltech forefeits it's image of a solid and customer orientated
company. As long-term Qt user (since 2000) I'm very dissatisfied that Trolltech makes Qt
conditonal to the interests of Nokia - so all customers have to live with the descisions of
Nokia - and maybe Qt will be ceased in a few years, if Nokia changes the software strategy.
From my point of view the future of Qt is very unsafe.
Nokia showed in Germany that they don't cope for agreements and contracts nor for their
employees and partners.
Therefore we (our company) furthermore cannot promote our software as "based on Qt"
anymore for german customers - that's very dissatisfying.
Nokia has lost their reputation and image in Germany - and now Trolltech too.
A very sad situation - especially for the German customers and the open source community.
Best Regards,
Christian Daehn
