Nokia to acquire Trolltech
Nokia to acquire Trolltech
Posted Jan 28, 2008 11:12 UTC (Mon) by jpetso (subscriber, #36230)In reply to: Nokia to acquire Trolltech by erwbgy
Parent article: Nokia to acquire Trolltech
> We also want to underline that we will continue to support > the open source community by continuing to release > these technologies under the GPL. These? Yes. New ones? Maybe. More pressure on the market to go open source and against software patents? Hardly. So the question is not if Nokia will cripple the existing frameworks (they won't) but if they will slow down the cause of free software by stagnating new developments. I can't give an answer to that question, but overall I'm concerned that Qt will receive less love than before and fall behind in terms of development speed and free software friendly advances instead of fighting for freedom like Trolltech did all the time.
Posted Jan 28, 2008 11:18 UTC (Mon)
by Jel (guest, #22988)
[Link]
Posted Jan 28, 2008 13:20 UTC (Mon)
by erwbgy (subscriber, #4104)
[Link] (5 responses)
I'm not sure how they could slow down the cause of free software by
stagnating new developments. What scenarios did you have in mind?
Posted Jan 28, 2008 15:42 UTC (Mon)
by dkite (guest, #4577)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jan 28, 2008 16:02 UTC (Mon)
by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
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Posted Jan 28, 2008 19:50 UTC (Mon)
by martinfick (subscriber, #4455)
[Link] (2 responses)
Since KDE happens to be highly tied to TrollTech's revenue stream today, what makes you think that a company would waste its money buying another company to just intentionally destroy its current revenue stream? While over time this revenue stream could be replaced with another one (and that *may* be the intent), it would seem to be a loss to eliminate an existing one as long as it doesn't interfere with the new one that you think might actually outperform the old one. So, yes, revenues streams are extremely important, and smart/successful businesses don't just pay money to throw them away for some pie in the sky future potential revenue stream.
Posted Jan 29, 2008 3:42 UTC (Tue)
by dkite (guest, #4577)
[Link]
Posted Jan 29, 2008 10:30 UTC (Tue)
by kripkenstein (guest, #43281)
[Link]
Nokia to acquire Trolltech
They could well see this as one of few possible ways to compete with
google in the increasingly open source mobile platform market
Nokia to acquire Trolltech
Nokia to acquire Trolltech
One comes to mind immediately.
Trolltech lived on the desktop. Their revenue streams were a library for
developers, and their marketing was KDE. When KDE looked good, Qt looked
good.
Their moves into the portable/phone/handheld market was built on the
foundation of their desktop business.
Nokia is a phone company. How interested is Nokia in the desktop? What
was a primary business now becomes not even secondary.
How does KDE advance Nokia? Why would Nokia care about KDE? Words don't
matter to me, revenue streams do.
Derek (who uses KDE and am wondering)
Nokia to acquire Trolltech
> How interested is Nokia in the desktop?
...
> Why would Nokia care about KDE?
This is just a thought, not an informed opinion, but since mobile phones are increasingly
desktop-like, and KDE is increasingly multi-platform Nokia might just be interested in KDE.
"How does KDE advance Nokia? Why would Nokia care about KDE? Words don't
matter to me, revenue streams do."
Nokia to acquire Trolltech
Nokia to acquire Trolltech
Are you saying that Nokia bought Trolltech so they could get into the
desktop software business? Somehow that doesn't make sense to me.
Nokia does phones. They have tried to extend the phone, along with the
rest of the market. Trolltech has some technology that fits that purpose
and market.
How does KDE fit into that? http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3235 tells
us that the price isn't high and Trolltech hasn't been enormously
profitable this last while.
I have this strange need for business arrangements to make sense. If
there isn't a symbiotic relationship between a business and a free
software project that makes sense, I take that into consideration.
So for you, how does KDE make sense for Nokia, notwithstanding the
soothing words?
Derek
Nokia to acquire Trolltech
Trolltech is terribly small compared to Nokia, which is one of the largest companies in the
world, in fact. It has more annual revenue than Microsoft.
The acquisition may have nothing to do with Trolltech's revenue stream. Perhaps Nokia believes
that incorporating parts of Qt in its System 40 and S60 will grow those revenue streams by 1%;
that would make this a worthy investment, even if all Trolltech revenue vanishes overnight. If
it raises them by 10%, well, pacts have been made with the devil for far less. All of
Trolltech's current revenue is completely dwarfed by these business interests.
Now, this is just speculation, time will tell. But based on the press releases, Nokia does in
fact intend to continue to push System 40 and S60, with Qt included in some manner (sadly, no
move to Linux...). As this is Nokia's *core* business, I presume that this is the reason for
the acquisition.
The thing to remember is that Trolltech needed money to survive somehow. They built a nice
business model around Qt, and KDE was a big part of that. Nokia has completely different
interests; it can run its Qt division with no revenue whatsoever if it helps out other
departments, like, again, its core business.