Nokia to acquire KDE originator Trolltech

Wow. I didn't see that one coming either. Two big sales in two weeks. So, who's buying what next week? IBM buying SugarCRM? Intel buying Canonical?

As long as the next one isn't "Microsoft buys Nokia".

Microsoft buys Mozilla.

It's cheaper for Nokia to buy Trolltech and get Qt and Qtopia than continually licensing Symbian for their phone. This has nothing to do with the N800 line of internet tablets. People talk about the "year of the Linux desktop". 2008 is the year of the Linux embedded device!

Quoting:Wow. I didn't see that one coming either.

You didn't? I remember being at the T-Dose introduction talk - together with you - where the Trolltech-guy was telling how Nokia was interested in QTopia, because of the difficulty these days to make apps run on 400 different phones. I didn't think they were going to buy it either, but on the other hand I understood Nokia was going to leave the closed Symbian road and go the QTopia / open way. Now we have to see how 'Open' open really is when it comes to Nokia. I predict Symbian will merge with another platform or die pretty soon.

I remember that. I guess Nokia felt that the closed source license of QT and QTopia were just a tad to hihj, so they just bought Trolltech and gave themselves a free license :-)

And speaking of the license...

http://trolltech.no/company/about/businessmodel

I'm not familiar enough with the mechanics of dual-licensing, so I have no idea how the dual-licensed Qt would be affected by such an acquisition. Would someone care to comment?

Quoting:I guess Nokia felt that the closed source license of QT and QTopia were...

I believe this is a trend that Apple started when they bought CUPS. It is a way of guaranteeing additional protection for their business especially when becoming very dependent on GPLed code.

GPLed code is becoming more credible triggering such purchases. In turn, such purchases will increase its credibility if the purchaser supports the code and keeps it under the GPL; such as this case.

Quoting:Would someone care to comment?

To put it simply: Any one can use QT under the GPL free of charge as long as their applications they develop using QT are also released under the GPL.

Any company who wants to develop applications using QT that are closed and not Free, they have to purchase QT under a commercial license to do that.

So if you want to go free, go GPL. If you want to go Commercial, better buy a license.