They bought the Consulting side basically - where it was possible to buy commercial licenses (didn't buy the core developers). Qt's moving towards open governance and Nokia (as stated) has developers contributing to Qt.
This makes sense, really, to avoid commercial Qt users from despairing about Nokia's plans.
Unless I'm missing something big, this means that the only part of Qt making money is now divorced from Qt development. So the development staff inside Nokia is not profitable and no longer strategic. In a large company, this is when you start looking for a new job.
I know one person in Nokia who did/does developer support. He's looking like a genius now because he submitted his resignation a month before the new partnership was announced (in Norway it's common to have to give 3 months notice).
Good point, except that Qt licensing has never bought in very big money to Nokia or Trolltech before it, especially after they changed the license from GPL to LGPL. I think Qt's being strategic lies in their being part of Nokia platforms.
On the other hand, Digia has been doing a lot of Qt work for Nokia, so it's good news for their developers.
Trolltech's total revenue is around €25 million. Total losses were around €6 million for the last couple of years. Total cash on hand at this point is around €13 million. They've got around 250 employees worldwide.
No info, though, on how this was split between licensing and other professional services.
Consider how Digia used to make money (taken from Qt's blog on this news item)
Employing hundreds of Qt experts, Digia has 7 years experience in providing top-class Qt competence, and is dedicated to continue and grow Qt Commercial relationships as well as to contribute innovation to the overall Qt LGPL and commercial community.
According to this comment [1], Qt has around 4000 licensees. A license is around $3,000, so that's roughly a 12 million dollar business, if we can trust those numbers.
Edit: actually, it's on the Qt press release itself. They state there [2] that:
> The Qt Commercial licensing business is growing and has around 3500 companies
The commercial development license is one facet, but the royalty per-unit payments are not mentioned. The product I currently ship with Qt is somewhere around USD $1 a unit.
Is this some sort of licensing model that they don't advertise? The only commercial licenses I'm aware of are per-developer licenses with no royalty structure.
"For regular desktop applications, there are no royalties, runtime licenses, or other additional costs. For fixed systems or devices where the main functionality relies on Qt, a runtime distribution license may apply."
They bought the Consulting side basically - where it was possible to buy commercial licenses (didn't buy the core developers). Qt's moving towards open governance and Nokia (as stated) has developers contributing to Qt.
This makes sense, really, to avoid commercial Qt users from despairing about Nokia's plans.