[Interest] Digia to acquire Qt from Nokia

[BRM]

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

> To: 'Bob Hood' <bhood2 at comcast.net>; "interest at qt-project.org" <interest at qt-project.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 9:00 AM
> Subject: Re: [Interest] Digia to acquire Qt from Nokia
>>  Wait a sec... wasn't that because Nokia bought a highly valuable
>>  toolkit, got a lot of testing and probably even bug fixes "for
>>  free" from the community, had a gazillion of Qt developers just
>>  waiting to unleash their creativity on Nokia phones... and then
>>  decided NOT to use it by going Windows mobile exclusively? Wasn't
>>  THAT the reason they failed with Qt?
> 
>   That's not exactly how it played out. By the time of Symbian^3,
>   Qt was a standard feature of Nokia's Symbian phones. Anna and
>   Belle also contained it as standard.
> 
>   And if I'm not mistaken, by that time, hadn't Nokia switched
>   over to using a Qt-based Web browser on Symbian? How many of
>   the software's other standard apps had been switched to Qt-
>   based designs? (The plan certainly was to switch all of them,
>   but I left Nokia before the changeover was accomplished.)
> 
>   Nokia didn't exactly throw away Qt without ever deploying it.
> 

He didn't say they didn't deploy (though I could see how that was implied);
just that they committed to it as a strategy that was 100% compatible with what
they were doing before, only to then go quickly in a very different direction that
was 100% compatible with any previous direction.

Qt didn't fail at Nokia.

Nokia failed to utilize Qt and stick with a strategy long enough to see it through to sucess.
Nokia's failure in that regard is their own, and purely a business one that has
no link to how Qt is licensed (other than possible political ones for Elop, but that's neither
here nor there).

Ben