[Development] Digia acquisition closed

[Knoll Lars]

Hi everybody,

I wanted to let you all know that the acquisition of Qt by Digia has been completed yesterday. Many Trolls in Oslo and Berlin have their first day working for Digia today. In Oslo we had lots of champagne and cake in the morning, giving us a pretty good start into the day ;-)

You will from now on see all the developers that have transferred over to Digia posting and submitting code with their brand new Digia email addresses.

This change should for the most part not have any effects on qt-project.org, but there are a few formal and legal changes happening now:

1. The CLA's of all contributors haven been assigned from Nokia to Digia. This is mainly an FYI, as nobody who has signed a CLA will need to take any explicit action here.

2. All traffic to qt.nokia.com will be redirected to qt.digia.com.

3. Digia has taken responsibility for the qt-project.org infrastructure and committed itself to continue funding it.

4. Digia has entered into the KDE Free Qt foundation agreement and is from now on bound by it.

5. With the acquisition, the Nokia copyrights on the Qt code base all transfer to Digia. Because of this we will need to change the copyright headers in all Qt source files from Nokia to Digia. In addition, we will re-add a small clause about commercial licensing into the headers to list all possible licensing variants there. The reason for adding the commercial piece is mainly transparency (because these are the possible licensing options). In addition, this change will enable us to avoid having to rewrite licensing headers during the release creating in the future and keep the same, unchanged source files in all releases (OSS and commercial).

With these changes the new licensing header for QObject will look as follows:

/****************************************************************************
**
** Copyright (C) 2012 Digia Plc and/or its subsidiary(-ies).
** Contact: http://qt-project.org/legal
**
** This file is part of the QtCore module of the Qt Toolkit.
**
** $QT_BEGIN_LICENSE:LGPL$
** Commercial License Usage
** Licensees holding valid commercial Qt licenses may use this file in
** accordance with the commercial license agreement provided with the
** Software or, alternatively, in accordance with the terms contained in
** a written agreement between you and Digia.  For licensing terms and
** conditions see http://qt.digia.com/licensing.  For further information
** use the contact form at http://qt.digia.com/contact-us.
**
** GNU Lesser General Public License Usage
** Alternatively, this file may be used under the terms of the GNU Lesser
** General Public License version 2.1 as published by the Free Software
** Foundation and appearing in the file LICENSE.LGPL included in the
** packaging of this file.  Please review the following information to
** ensure the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 requirements
** will be met: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html.
**
** In addition, as a special exception, Digia gives you certain additional
** rights.  These rights are described in the Digia Qt LGPL Exception
** version 1.1, included in the file LGPL_EXCEPTION.txt in this package.
**
** GNU General Public License Usage
** Alternatively, this file may be used under the terms of the GNU
** General Public License version 3.0 as published by the Free Software
** Foundation and appearing in the file LICENSE.GPL included in the
** packaging of this file.  Please review the following information to
** ensure the GNU General Public License version 3.0 requirements will be
** met: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.
**
**
** $QT_END_LICENSE$
**
****************************************************************************/

As you can see, it's basically the same header as before, will all occurrences of Nokia replaced by Digia, the section about "Commercial License Usage" added and the contact page changed to qt-project.org/legal so that we have a better landing page for legal questions (that page is being created right now…).

Cheers,
Lars