durbn.net

Nokia went and bought Trolltech, the makers of the Qt Toolkit. I use Qt extensively for both home and work related programming. It's an excellent API built right on C++ but has bindings in Java, Python and many other languages.

This where the power of the GPL and Open-source in general becomes so important. Trolltech's is worth roughly about 0.1% of what Nokia is worth. In a situation like this Nokia could discontinue Qt, disband Trolltech, or bloat the software like Microsoft does. But the fact that it's open source means that anyone can just grab the current source and fork it over to a new project. At that point we may not have such a good company like Trolltech working commercially behind Qt, but the community could take charge and run with it. If Qt was a purely proprietary piece of software it would disappear completely and we'd all be forced to switch to Gtk. =)

Now that's the worst case scenario. Fortunately it sounds like Nokia is trying to play nice with the open source community. They have made an open letter to the open source community, a letter to existing Trolltech customers, and to Trolltech's partners. They explain that they want to continue to actively develop and support Qt both commercially and in open source. Above that they also are going to become a patron of KDE, Qt's biggest "test-case".

I'm not scared of this merger. At the worst case it would mean no more commercial support for Qt but continued community support. At the best case it means a company with a ton more money to hire more developers!

And since Trolltech is a commercial company interested in making money (as well as a kick-ass OSS toolkit) and Nokia is a commercial company interested in making money I don't think too much will change.

All in all we'll have to wait and see which way the winds of change will blow. I continue to support Qt by actively developing with it.