Digia has reached an agreement to acquire the commercial licensing and professional services components of Nokia's Qt software group. The move will bring some diversity to Qt's corporate backing and potentially expand the availability of consulting services for commercial Qt adopters.

Trolltech, the company behind the open source Qt development toolkit, was acquired by Nokia in 2008. Nokia aimed to accelerate the evolution of the toolkit and boost its suitability for cross-platform mobile development so that it could be used as the foundation for a unified Symbian and MeeGo third-party application ecosystem. As part of that strategy, Nokia relicensed Qt under the GNU's permissive Lesser General Public License (LGPL) in 2009.

Qt remained the heart of Nokia's platform strategy until the company began its recent transition to Windows Phone 7. Nokia's new strategy relegates MeeGo to the status of a toy platform with significantly diminished funding and calls for Symbian to be gradually deprecated. Because Nokia is still shipping Symbian smartphones in the short-term and intends to keep its internal MeeGo efforts humming along (albeit it with heavily reduced funding), it makes sense for the company to continue advancing Qt.

Qt is not a central component of Nokia's business, however, which means that the company doesn't have much interest in serving the growing demand for professional services relating to the toolkit. Digia is acquiring the relevant components of Nokia's Qt business with the aim of filling that need for the broader Qt ecosystem and ensuring that Qt's commercial licensing and support options remain robust.

This move makes good sense on several different levels. Digia will have the resources to make significant contributions to Qt and advance the development of the toolkit in collaboration with Nokia. The presence of a financially-sustainable Qt business outside of Nokia will also help reduce uncertainty among third-party developers about Qt's long-term health.

"We are excited to extend our Qt business to serve our new customers. Building on our in-depth Qt expertise and experience from demanding mission critical solutions, we will offer world-class commercial licensing and support services to Qt Commercial customers," said Digia SVP Harri Paani in a statement. "We also look forward to driving further the evolution of Qt by bringing in new features and services."

Qt's future

Due to Qt's permissive licensing and a long-standing contractual arrangement that Trolltech made with the KDE community way back in the day, there has never really been any doubt that Qt will survive. In the absolute worst -case scenario, it would still have a future as a community-driven project. Digia's involvement, however, provides a valuable assurance that there will continue to be strong commercial backing and corporate support for the toolkit regardless of how Nokia moves forward.

Digia is a Finnish software company that already does Qt-related consulting and has a significant number of Qt Certified Developers on staff. I was first introduced to Digia last year when I had the pleasure of meeting a few of the company's employees at the Qt Developer Days event in San Francisco. Digia demoed several of its projects at the event, including a slick social networking tool for Symbian built with Qt Quick.

The only real risk this new arrangement poses to the community is the possibility that Digia might not make all of its Qt improvements available under the permissive LGPL as Nokia historically has. It would be unfortunate if the toolkit were to become fragmented due to certain pieces only being made available to commercial licensees. It's still not entirely clear exactly how Digia intends to proceed in that respect.

It's important to understand that this deal is confined to specific components of the Qt business relating to commercial licensing and business services. Contrary to reports that were published elsewhere, this is NOT a full-blown sale of all the Qt assets. Nokia is retaining ownership of all the copyrights and will continue to be the primary corporate force behind Qt. A modest number of Nokia's Qt licensing and support staffers will be moving to Digia as part of the deal, but Nokia is keeping its Qt development workforce.

I discussed the implications of the deal in a phone conversation with Nokia's Daniel Kihlberg. He says that Nokia is still strongly committed to Qt and has no plans to decrease its own involvement in active Qt development. He says that the sale of the commercial licensing and professional services components to Digia will help expand the commercial Qt ecosystem and strengthen the services available to commercial adopters.

I was a bit surprised to learn that there are still a significant number of paying Qt licensees despite Qt's move to the more permissive LGPL. Kihlberg explained to me that the commercial licensees represent a small percentage of the global Qt developer community, but are still numerous enough (and growing in number) to create some good opportunities for Digia.

Despite Nokia's move towards Windows Phone 7, Qt was and remains an impressive technology for rapid cross-platform development. Qt's future isn't as bright today as it was prior to Nokia's defection to Windows, but Qt application developers can now rest easy knowing that the toolkit isn't on a trajectory for the chopping block.