[Interest] Digia to acquire Qt from Nokia

[Atlant Schmidt]

BRM:

> And that's hogwash.

  Okay, I'll make my statement more clear:

  "Still, this may serve as an indication that once a company
  converts a piece of formerly proprietary (closed-source)
  software to open-sourced software, that company, in making
  that transition, effectively throws away most of their
  monetary investment in that software."

  Nokia has absolutely proven this proposition with both
  Symbian and Qt where they discarded essentially all of
  the investment that Nokia made in acquiring both Symbian
  and Trolltech.

  I'd argue that Sun Microsystems also proved this when
  they open-sourced Solaris.

  Do you have a counter-example?

                               Atlant

-----Original Message-----
From: BRM [mailto:bm_witness at yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, August 13, 2012 9:30 AM
To: Atlant Schmidt; interest at qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Interest] Digia to acquire Qt from Nokia

> From: Atlant Schmidt <aschmidt at dekaresearch.com>

>  Still, this may serve as an indication that once a company
>  converts a piece of closed-source software to open-sourced
>  software, that company has effectively thrown away most of
>  the *MONETARY* value of that software.


And that's hogwash.

What's the *MONETARY* value in Qt?

1. Using it in your own products.
2. Selling Services to support it.

If you're only interested in #1, then you're right. But then, you'd never publish the API to start with - you'd want to keep it as a competitive advantage so you'd keep as much as possible under lock and key. But you'll also never realize the true potential of most of what you use to build your own software, or the software itself in many cases.


But if you're interested in #2, then you can't really count #1 as you'd get that anyway by simply continuing to use it with yourself listed as a customer.

So the real value is in #2, which is where all the money is for open source software. That's where developers like Thiago (and others on this list) make their money; and companies like TrollTech and Digia make theirs.


Ben



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