Nokia announced this week that it is selling the its QT business to Digia. News stories describe this as a sale of the commercial business only — it’s unclear from the announcements whether any intellectual property has been transferred. Engaget reports, “Digia will acquire the Qt commercial licensing and services business from Nokia, including the transfer of some 3,500 desktop and embedded customers actively using Qt today” and 19 consultants previously working for Nokia. Nokia acquired QT along with Trolltech in 2008 for $150 million. QT is dual licensed under LGPL and commercial licenses; Nokia changed the open source license for QT from the idiosyncratic QT license to LGPL after that acquisition. QT is is an application framework for developing software. While Nokia has stated that it continues to support QT, Nokia recently announced its adoption of Windows as a platform for mobile devices, rather than MeeGo, which supports QT — so Nokia’s long term strategy would probably result in yet another open source orphan, absent the mantle of commercial support undertaken by Digia.
