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

[Jason H]

You're preaching to the choir. Rest in peace Nokia Meego, and it's replacement, Windows Phone. It never even ran on a zune!

I bet you Qt could run on a zune. 


> Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 at 4:03 PM
> From: "Roland Hughes" <roland at logikalsolutions.com>
> To: interest at qt-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Interest] When Microsoft comes to purchase Qt what will, be the outcome?
>
> 
> 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
> 
> http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com
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> 
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