So Nokia is buying Trolltech.
Personally, I think this is bad news. I don’t trust Nokia for various reasons.
Why did Nokia buy Trolltech? Well, this article called it a strategic hat trick. They gained control of Qtopia while harming Motorola. The purchase was strategic for the phone/embedded market.
But what about Qt Desktop?
Nokia has promised to keep Qt development the same, they will also become a Patron of KDE.
Qt is also self-supporting financially so it may come true.
On the other hand, desktop toolkits/apps are not a Nokia core business so Qt development could be halted and Trolltech engineers moved to tasks more beneficial to the core business.
This would make the free Qt foundation kick in and make Qt BSD licensed. But then what?
If no other company picks up Qt, Qt and KDE will be left in a pretty bad shape.
Currently, all Qt development is being made by Trolltech. Also, some core KDE developers are sponsored by Trolltech.
In the worst case scenario where Nokia abandons Qt, not only will KDE be hurt by the loss of some of its full-time core developers.
The remaining KDE developers will also be spread even thinner since they would also need to develop Qt. Basically, that would mean KDE development would come to a screeching halt.
All in all, this acquisition could bring a few good changes if Nokia behaves: More funding into Qt, and possibly a switch to LGPL/BSD to accelerate adoption.
But it could also bring many bad changes if Nokia goes evil on us, which would basically mean crippling KDE development really bad.
