Nokia Buys Trolltech 311
egil writes "Trolltech announced this morning (CET) that they have accepted a bid from Nokia to buy the entire company. The bid was for 16 NOK per share, which values the company at an equivalent of approximately 150 million USD. The stock currently trades at 15.70 on the Oslo stack exchange, up from around 10 on Friday. The offer has already been accepted by the Trolltech BOD."
KDE Qt Free Foundation (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:KDE Qt Free Foundation (Score:5, Interesting)
I assume that means as long as Nokia continues to develop Qt in the same manner (keeping Qt Free available for KDE), then the agreement doesn't apply.
Qtopia? (Score:4, Interesting)
If Nokia switches to full-linux-ahead with it, it would really be sweet, although we'd see a nice internal fight between the existing GTK stack and the new qt one
Licensing Issues for the Future (Score:3, Interesting)
The KDE Foundation takes the code if qt is ever released closed. Not sure if it covers a buy out situation but I'm pretty sure it does.
You might say, "but then the community can fork Qt." Yes, a fork is possible. The fork will then be GPL2/GPL3, which is somewhat problematic, in that in the future we will never be able to write KDE apps in GPL4, should such be released (and I presume that Microsoft's attacks on FOSS will necessitate a GPL4 eventually, just as Microsoft's deal with Novell necessitated certain clauses in the GPL3). That is, yes, we can fork Qt, but we cannot add licenses to it (only the copyright holders can, and Nokia is now that entity). Thankfully Trolltech helped out KDE this time by letting Qt be GPL3, but next time, we have no assurances whatsoever.
Re:KDE Qt Free Foundation (Score:5, Interesting)
company. It forces a fork of licensing, etc. making a BSD licensed version possible at the KDE Qt Free Foundation's
discretion under those circumstances. At that point you'd have a version of Qt that was GPLed, BSD, and the completely
closed license version that the new owners had.
In this case, I doubt that Nokia would take it private- they know what Open Source is and seem to have few issues
with it in general. I'm not quite sure why they're picking Trolltech and Qt up, to be honest, considering how
well Maemo and Hildon works on things like their N770/N800/N810, but perhaps they're picking them up because they
want another option choice on the UI and applications suite front.
Underlying Implications (Score:5, Interesting)
The only obvious reason I can see for this decision is that Nokia's Mobile OS technology has been gradually falling behind for a number of years. Buying Trolltech gives them all the tech that went into the Zaurus devices and Trolltech's mobile environment (as seen on the green phone).
I assume that over the next day or two an official announcement will be made about Nokia's intentions for the Qt licensing. In the mean time we all have to sit on our hands and anticipate a fork. On one hand this is a bit of a slap in the face to the Gnome/GTK teams that seems to imply Qt was the superior technology. On the other hand it also justifies Gnome's existence as a project to begin with, there have always been concerns that Trolltech would take it's ball and go home. KDE is extremely dependent on paid developers at Trolltech for much of the code that is written, it will also be interesting to see if Nokia ends up becoming a major sponsor to both projects. Only time will tell.
Re:Lovely (Score:5, Interesting)
It was a shock to find out, while being in an auditorium, listening to a beautiful classic guitar concert, and suddenly a phone rang from the guitar... or so it seemed.
Re:Smart move! (Score:3, Interesting)
maybe i heard wrong, as its something i'd really like to look at - especially if pyqt will soon work on the s60 due to this move, gotta be better than that java rubbish.
Nokia more involved than I thought (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:KDE Qt Free Foundation (Score:5, Interesting)
I assume that means as long as Nokia continues to develop Qt in the same manner (keeping Qt Free available for KDE), then the agreement doesn't apply.
I don't see Nokia as interested in the Linux desktop, so I presume that part of Trolltech's work will not continue exactly as before; why pay the salaries of several KDE developers, for example - not sure Nokia will see the point in that. I don't predict immediate firings, though, but if I was one of them I wouldn't count on long-term job security. What I do see Nokia as wanting from Trolltech is everything related to mobile devices, Qtopia, all that stuff. So overall Qt may continue to be developed, but I'm not sure its focus won't move to one that is less useful for KDE.
Of course, this risk with KDE basing itself on Qt was obvious all the time due to the licensing model there. It is probably part of the reason why all major distros have moved to GNOME.
Greephone (Score:3, Interesting)
Wireless in five years (Score:5, Interesting)
While I understand your arguments it would now be a relatively easy way for Nokia to sneakin to that business. Before this buyout it would have been "impossible".
Don't forget that the margins of the mobile phone industry may be diminishing and that the distinction between a mobile phone and a laptop is blurred more and more. Nokia is spreading its risks. Who knows what a laptop's wireless connection will look like in five years. I don't, but I guess Nokia now is better prepared to not only know, but also to adapt and dictate.
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commercial desktop users? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm also not sure this acquisition makes sense from a mobile perspective. Nokia needs a better UI strategy than they have right now, but Qt isn't really the top choice in that space either. This purchase really strikes me as one company with an aging platform buying another company with an aging platform.
Well, I guess we'll know how things turn out when the dust settles.
commercial licenses are the issue (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not the main issue. Qt already is under the GPL, so whatever Nokia does or doesn't do won't affect KDE.
The big question is what Nokia will do for commercial developers.
I think Nokia's best bet is to re-release the desktop edition of Qt under a BSD-style license right away. Nokia isn't going to make much money from licensing anyway, and a BSD release could make Qt much more popular as a toolkit for everybody.
Re:KDE Qt Free Foundation (Score:3, Interesting)
They're also in the IDE business [slashdot.org], since they joined the Eclipse foundation, and have been pumping code into the C/C++ components, so people can use them to work on extensions for their own phones.
Re:KDE Qt Free Foundation (Score:5, Interesting)
It's nice to have GTK and all, but look at QT4, it has much more advanced features. KDE3.5 already has a smaller memory footprint than Gnome, thanks to QT4 KDE4 will have an even smaller footprint.
There were the GreenPhone. Also, there's already a Windows Mobile port of QT4, proving that it's well suited for embedded devices. And QT4 has Java bindings, witch is widely used on cellphone development as it is sandboxed.
Pehaps Nokia is looking into replacing Symbian with a Linux stack? Pehaps they found out GTK lacking? Pehaps they fell the need to be able to control more directly the development of their toolkit of choice?
Time will tell.
Re:Underlying Implications (Score:4, Interesting)
I find that hard to believe considering the rate at which Gnome is including Microsoft's tech.
Re:KDE is important for Trolltech and Qt (Score:5, Interesting)
Any company that does this is one to be feared.
the KKKPc (Score:2, Interesting)
The laptop segment is starting to see a wide range of ultr-portable low-cost PC's like the eeePC and the Everex Cloudbook. These run Linux with a lightweight GUI. Maybe Nokia is viewing this as the future of the ultramobile laptop segment and thinks it needs to have a foothold in that. Paying $150 million for that actually looks cheap IMHO.
Think about it, they have Maemo which is targetted at web-tablets and is stabilising quite well. They have Symbian , OpenC and Python for their high-end NSeries and ESeries phones. The one area of the "mobile" segement wherein they are currently lacking is the UMPC/el-cheapo laptop and by acquiring Trolltech and with it Qtopia/Qt they can make serious inroads into this upcoming area.
Re:Licensing Issues for the Future (Score:3, Interesting)
The GPLv3 is probably the most well reviewed license in history. It has some new features that are controversial but it's pretty much watertight exactly what it says. Try striking out the GPLv3-specific parts and try to do a side-by-side comparison and you'll see it. So far Tivo is the exception, not the norm and noone has a concrete example of Novell using the Microsoft patents in a way the GPLv3 forbids, nor are there any open source DRM systems to speak of.
In short, there's still a lot of question whether the GPLv3 is needed at all. Not everyone is happy about it either, as has been reported here repeatedly. To put it this way, if the GPLv2 was good for 15+ years, I think this one is good for 50+ years.
Re:Smart move! (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks pretty active, release wise. I too am interested in looking at this, pretty excited to see this news if I must be honest.
Re:KDE Qt Free Foundation (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a nice gesture, but if Nokia wanted to be evil (though all recent signs show that they won't) they could lock it up in court for years and years. If Nokia lets Qt stagnate, the easier option for the KDE people would be to just fork the GPL codebase.
Personally I see the opposite happening, and Nokia pouring resources into Qt development. Clearly they want an alternative to Symbian where they own the whole enchilada, or at least don't have to play development politics with all the other Symbian partners.
I've been waiting for *someone* to buy TrollTech.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nokia doesn't make their money licensing software, and I don't think they want to change that now. TrollTech was relatively cheap, because there wasn't a really lucrative market for their commercial licenses. TT had to stick with the dual-license model, because they had no other revenue stream. Nokia is a hardware manufacturer, and I'd think running their hardware on a mainstream software platform would be important to them. Going LGPL would go a long way toward accomplishing that.
Unless Nokia fears their competitors having equal access to the same software platform, a move to the LGPL would be all to the upside. And if they do fear that, then they could fork the Qtopia phone platform and keep that GPL. Or even drop the GPL version and go completely commercial on that. But these days, smart phones need a developer-friendly platform every bit as much as desktop systems do. QT would have some performance advantages over Google's Java-based phone platform. And Nokia, as the first mover and primary maintainer of the platform, ought to be able to leverage that into a huge lead.
That's if they make the switch to LGPL. And if they don't? They'll have a great phone platform, but less open to 3rd party developers. If they think, based on that, they can win a competitive battle for setting smart phone standards with Google and Microsoft, go for it. But I don't think they can. They're smart. They understand why Linux has all the buzz , BSD does not, and OS/2 is gone. GPL for apps, LGPL for libraries. It's scary to a commercial enterprise, but it really works - at least better than anything else (except, maybe, having a monopoly on desktop operating systems...).
Good News (Score:5, Interesting)
Your fear is unwarranted. My take on this: Nokia is a getting a little leary of MS gaining increasing control at Novell with their hand up Miguel.
Besides, basing your products on GTK is hard, there I said it.
QT is a programmer's dream to work with. Fully documented, Open Source, (or Closed if your PHB is twitchy) Cross compatible, and simple. Got a problem a shout out to the trolls usually clears it up. Licensor or not.
Nokia makes hardware and wants to control their own destiny. Makes perfect business sense, but so does keeping the good will of the community. Recent foibles with the n700 taught them that.
I use only KDE, I develop Desktop Applications and Embedded Devices using QT. It would be fair to call me a fanboy of the Trolls. I also have an unhealthy desire to own a n810, n700, and n800. The only thing holding me back was that I hate the GTK based Maemo toolkit. Recently KDE was ported, and with this development is making it difficult for me to contain the copious amounts drool.
Re:I've been waiting for *someone* to buy TrollTec (Score:5, Interesting)
In retrospect, I consider Qt one of the two biggest 'misses' in open-source, the other being OpenSolaris. If Trolltech had 'gotten it' in time, GNOME wouldn't exist, and Qt/KDE would dominate the Linux desktop completely, a great vantage point from which to consider other markets. Likewise, if Sun had 'gotten it' way back then, OpenSolaris would be what Linux is today, Linux wouldn't exist, and Sun would be making a fortune. Yes, all of this is in retrospect, but the two stories are interesting, I think. And both revolve around fears of 'going all the way' with an open-source business model. Problem is, waiting too long is even worse. Maybe Nokia will get it right?
Re:I've been waiting for *someone* to buy TrollTec (Score:3, Interesting)
It's possible that Sun could have prevented Linux from being a success, and perhaps even from being started at all. I believe that corporate politics would have ruined it -- very few companies are willing to let their product go enough that it transcends them. Look at the free software that came out of companies: MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Asterisk, QT. They're still pretty much controlled by those companies. Firefox is an exception only because the parent company pretty much forgot about it.
Re:KDE Qt Free Foundation (Score:3, Interesting)
At any rate, back to using the parent's definition, I still wouldn't consider GTK all that much more "Linux-native" than Qt. You mention GTK's Windows and MacOS X backends: I doubt new features/architecture would be accepted into GTK that would break the Windows backend. Ditto for the Mac backend, though it's nowhere near as mature as either the X11 or Windows backends. And similarly (as someone who reads gtk-devel-list regularly), I doubt new functionality would be added to GTK that didn't seem useful in some way on all platforms. I know discussions regarding this have come up in the past.
I couldn't find that much on Qt's early history, but it seems the X11 port of Qt is at least as old as the Windows port, if not older. So I doubt any one platform can drive Qt's development in such a way that would ignore the others. And I'd tend to think that a toolkit designed from the start to be multi-platform would be much better-designed than one that targets only one platform.
Anyhow, just the humble opinion of a developer who's worked with GTK, Qt, Win32 (unfortunately), Cocoa, and a few of others at various times.
Re:Get ready for Layoffs (Score:3, Interesting)
if you read the letter to the open source community, you would see that Nokia is applying to become a patron of KDE.