Nokia sells off commercial and services arm of Qt

Nokia has announced that it is selling the commercial licensing and professional services arm of its Qt group to Digia, a Finnish services and software company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Nokia plans to retain all the core development, and copyright, of the Qt framework and continue development, but the business of selling Qt under its commercial licence and supporting those customers will be transferred to Digia – Nokia does not think these are "core business activities". Sebastian Nyström, Nokia's head of MeeGo, Qt and WebKit, said that Nokia’s Qt technical support team will support and work closely with Digia for the next year, "to ensure a smooth transition".

Digia said in its announcement that its remit will be wider than Nokia's original plans and will include developing desktop and embedded Qt functionality and potentially porting Qt to older platforms that were not in Nokia's roadmap. Commercial sales and marketing personnel and some of Nokia's technical consulting services team will transfer to Digia as part of the deal.

Qt has historically been dual licensed. The code has been available under various "free" licences; since 2009 Qt has been available under the LGPL 2.1. It has also been available under a commercial licence which has allowed over 3,500 companies to make use of the Qt code in their products without having to redistribute source code or comply with the other requirements of the free licence. Details of how the change in ownership will affect these Qt customers is due to be communicated directly to them.

Nokia also says that it will be introducing an "open governance model" for Qt soon, which will "enable other companies, such as Digia, to more easily contribute to Qt". The company released a beta of the Qt SDK 1.1 last week, along with Qt 4.7.2, Qt Mobility 1.1.1 and Qt Creator 2.1.

See also:

• Nokia and open source – a trial by fire, a feature from The H.
  

(djwm)