[Interest] Digia to acquire Qt from Nokia

[Rui Maciel]

On 08/15/2012 01:06 PM, Atlant Schmidt wrote:
> Konrad:
>
>> Wrong: it decreases the direct sales value, but
>> hugely increases the use value and with that the
>> indirect sales value.
>
>    And the "indirect sales value" matters not a
>    whit to the owner of the software (or the
>    shareholders of the owner)

You will be hard pressed to find a single person involved in business 
administration who believes that an increase in their product's 
potential customers is bad for business.


>    unless the owner
>    is actively reaping a significant fraction
>    of that "indirect sales value" (which Nokia
>    wasn't).

If Nokia didn't reaped any reward then Nokia has only Nokia to complain 
about.  Nokia bought Trolltech to base their software platform on Qt,[1] 
which was supposed to be Nokia's stragety until 2011.[2]  Nokia didn't 
purchased Trolltech expecting that licensing Qt would be a cash cow. 
Then, once they abandoned their strategy, it appears their executives 
saw no value on Qt, which appeared to have led them to dump it.  So, if 
the company didn't followed through on their business strategy then the 
company's business mistakes obviously weren't Qt's fault, or how it was 
being licensed to third parties.


[1] 
http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/nokia-acquires-trolltech-for-153-million/
[2] 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/aug/09/nokia-sells-qt-software-business


>    I'm sorry; the FOSS folks have argued for years
>    that they have a workable financial model but
>    I see no evidence that this is true for anything
>    other than individuals and relatively small-scale
>    commercial operations.

Have you ever heard of a company called Red Hat?  I believe their 
business goes a bit beyond small-scale.


>> LGPL'ing Qt also opened a major backdoor for it: you
>> can safely introduce it in any project where there are
>> no major reasons against it
>
>    Unfortunately, as has already been mentioned by several
>    other folks, the fact that a given piece of software is
>    licensed under the terms of the (L)GPL is a huge factor
>    arguing against its use in several industries.  The more-
>    open licenses (BSD, MIT, etc.) are free from the large
>    burdens that (L)GPL imposes for disclosure, upgrade-
>    ability, extensive ongoing code analysis, and the like.

Are you aware that Qt is also distributed under a commercial license? If
any company is quite able to use Qt without being forced to comply with
the LGPL then it's patently obvious that, in those circumstances, the 
LGPL is irrelevant.

http://www.digia.com/en/Qt/Product/


Rui Maciel