From sometime now, Qt looked like a criminal on a death penalty waiting to hear from the jury on his plea. No one seemed to care about the framework that gave us so many possibilities. But, now, Qt lovers and developers can smile in relief. Qt’s future has been rested upon safe hands. “Oh, cut the crap ! What do you want to say?” Finnish corporation Digia has bought Qt completely from Nokia today putting an end to all the rumors that were doing rounds.
Qt framework can be used to develop applications irrespective of the platform that you’re in. Qt was initially created by the Trolltech. Nokia which was then looking to expand its Symbian and Meego business had laid its hands on Qt and its development process. The early phases of which looked promising, then seemed to falter. Nokia failed in all of its Symbian business, finding it difficult to put up with iOS and Android. That was when Nokia had decided to go to Microsoft for help thus deciding on making nothing but Windows phones from then on. Looks like this decision had affected Qt as well. It was just last week that Nokia had closed its Qt offices in Australia. And now, the entire operations, licensing, R&D and literally just about anything ABCD of Qt shall be taken care of Digia. The existing people at Nokia’s Qt developer team shall shift their cabins to Digia soon.
Neither of them have disclosed the value of the deal that was struck. As clearly as it can be seen, Nokia is looking desperately to make some money by trying to shut down assets and values wherever possible thus cutting costs. It has already closed several of its offices and factories across the world and shut down all of its operations except for Windows Phone. Though a calculated risk, I might say, investing entirely on Windows, they’ve got no other option to go with should they meet the competition put up against them by Apple and Google.
On the other hand, Digia which had last year bought the rights to license Qt for commercial purposes is making some gains too. It shall now be the prime force behind Qt development and operations expansion. Digia’s big plans include taking Qt to platforms such as iOS, Android and Windows 8 by providing development toolkits and improvising the desktop Qt support. Apart from the commercial builds, Digia shall also guide the Community based Open Source model of Qt.