Digia acquires part of Nokia's Qt business

It was announced this morning that Digia Plc will acquire the "Qt software technologies and Qt business" from Nokia. This ends the recent uncertainty in the Qt community, something that should be beneficial for the Qt ecosystem and the Qt users worldwide, including KDAB's customers, and hopefully ensures the continuity and sustained funding of Qt development.

KDAB is the second largest contributor to Qt5 today, and others are also investing heavily. There are some more quite big organizations in the desktop, industrial automation, automotive, IPTV space and elsewhere which are deeply committed to Qt and will contribute to keeping it moving forward. Qt5 is going to be released soon and, in our estimation, provides a great foundation to build on for many years (remember, it is already more than seven years since Qt4 was released, and it is still going very strong). Nokia selling Qt mostly means that their priorities, in particular with respect to their platforms, are less of a concern in Qt development now, while the priorities of organizations that contribute more, such as KDAB and our customers that we support, will gain more weight. Of course, it is also KDAB's hope and strong expectation that Digia will start contributing more to Qt so that the Qt ecosystem as a whole can move the technology ahead at an unreduced or even increased speed. Digia's announcement in that respect sounds very promising, something KDAB applauds.

Qt continues to be the only viable option for cross-platform (Mac, Linux, Windows) development on the desktop, the only viable option for high performance native development of modern applications in the embedded space, both consumer and industrial, and a great foundation for building OpenGL and HTML5 stacks for front-end development using those technologies.

KDAB is extending both hands to everybody contributing to Qt and hopes for joint efforts to make Qt better than ever. In particular, it is important that as many Qt developers as possible find a new home, even those not part of the deal announced today, and KDAB will attempt to contribute its share to that, too. As for marketing Qt to potential users, ICS and KDAB have already announced that they will host the Qt Developer Conference in California and Berlin this year, and the vast majority of players in the ecosystem are quickly rallying behind that.

Personally, I have worked with Qt since 1996, and at no time between then and now has there been a more intense and productive development going on in Qt. Qt is embodying so many technologies and platforms these days that it is almost impossible for a single person to keep up with all developments, and it just keeps going on.

If you have any further questions about this matter, or would like to learn more about how KDAB can help you get the most out of Qt, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Matthias Kalle Dalheimer
President and CEO of KDAB