[Interest] When Microsoft comes to purchase Qt what will, be the outcome?

[Roland Hughes]

On 9/26/18 4:41 AM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> The "poison pill" of the KDE Free Qt Foundation kicks in if there are
> commercial releases with no equivalent open source within 12 months of that
> release. It does not kick in if the maintainer community decides to drop some
> platforms.
>
> For the latter, there's always the ability to fork. If anyone disagrees with
> the direction Qt (or any other Open Source project, for that matter) is going,
> fork it and maintain it the way you want it to go (after, of course, trying to
> engage the community to argue your case).


Microsoft has a phenomenal track record of running both companies and 
products into the ground. They also have an incredibly long history of 
failures people rather conveniently forget about. Here is my all time 
favorite Malcolm Berko quote:

=====

Microsoft (MSFT-$58) may be making a dreadful boo-boo with its 
$196-per-share purchase of LinkedIn (LNKD-$192), which since 2011 has 
dumbly traded between $56 and $275 and never earned a dime. MSFT's new 
CEO, Satya Nadella, will be the old CEO if this LNKD acquisition fails 
as I and some important insiders think it will. Nadella believes that 
adding a professional social network to its business-focused software 
line will allow MSFT to wean itself from its legacy of personal 
computers. LNKD, with zero earnings prospects in sight, isn't a bargain 
at $26 billion; rather, it's an expensive and seemingly frantic gamble. 
And MSFT has a really stinky record with takeovers and buyouts. Its 
purchase of Nokia's handsets quickly morphed into a $7.5 billion 
write-off. Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion, which turned into a 
black hole, and then put $605 million into Barnes & Noble's Nook 
e-reader, which flopped, and its Skype purchase is an embarrassing 
failure. MSFT paid $6.3 billion for aQuantive, an online advertising 
company that's worthless. MSFT bought Visio for $1.4 billion, Navision 
for $1.5 billion and Tellme Networks for $800 million, and they're all 
worthless. During Steve Ballmer's tenure, MSFT bought 149 companies, and 
121 of them have vaporized into the ether. No wonder Ballmer is bald.

=====

I come from the DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) world. I have 
watched Microsoft try to kill other, far superior, products off before. 
I've lived through the history where Compaq, fronted/funded/financially 
backed by Microsoft bought DEC then announced they were killing OpenVMS 
so Compaq servers with NT on them could get into the data center. I was 
also around to hear the stories about the day various DoD/NSA personnel 
paid an unexpected visit informing upper management that killing off the 
OS which ran a huge portion of the defense industry, not to mention most 
nuclear power plants, was an act of treason and that they would be 
spending the rest of their lives in solitary per the terms of the contract.

Most of you will be too young to remember when Microsoft offered to 
"give" Novell "Microsoft Money" so they could buy Quicken. The courts 
struck it down. At the time Quicken was rumored to be written with ZAF 
(Zinc Application Framework) and a non-Microsoft compiler. It worked 
better and ran faster than "Money." You will have to learn about "Money" 
on Wikipedia as it doesn't exist anymore.

I won't even bother going into Janet Reno (at the behest of the 
Clintons) committing treason against the human species not putting Bill 
Gates in Prison

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.

Windows, all the way up to and including 98, was NOT an operating 
system. It was a task switching GUI ran on top of DOS. Advertising it as 
an operating system was both wire and mail fraud.

Microsoft doesn't like "other successful software." Qt hasn't been 
successful enough for Microsoft to divert as much attention. They only 
tried to shove Qt out of the phone market by purchasing Nokia and making 
them use only Microsoft products.

No, Microsoft will not need to buy Qt. The current owners of Qt will 
force it from the market with their current (and probably future) 
licensing policies.


As to forking, there are already hundreds of forks of Qt. Basically at 
every medical device manufacturer which used 3.x or 4.x to build one or 
more devices. They have had no choice but to fork and maintain because 
developers would rather add something broken than fix the last broken 
thing to get added.



-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630) 205-1593

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