Digia,the Helsinki-based software firm,has completed the acqusition of the Qt software technologies and Qt business from Nokia.
Digia becomes responsible for all the Qt activities formerly carried out by Nokia.
These include product development,as well as the commercial and open source licensing and service business.Following the acquisition,Digia plans to quickly enable Qt on Android,iOS and Windows 8 platforms.
Digia said it aims to"improve its position within the Qt ecosystem by further strengthening Qt's R&D capabilities and expanding its reach on many more platforms than ever before".
Digia acquired the Qt Commercial licensing business from Nokia in March 2011.
With over 450,000 users, Qt is a cross-platform application development framework which supports multiple platforms and operating systems.
Once developed on a Windows desktop PC,for example,an application's code can be re-used on a smartphone,tablet computer or embedded device.
Qt comes with a built-in tool-chain,IDE and an extensive set of C++frameworks.
Qt Quick's declarative programming method, for user interface development, couples QML and JavaScript with a C++engine, user interfaces.
Digia has initiated projects to deliver full support for Android and iOS mobile and tablet operating systems within Qt and will present the product roadmap and strategy later in the yearl.
Digia will continue the work with ecosystem members and the Qt community to secure a successful release of Qt5 and is committed to continuing the Qt Project in order to maintain Qt's availability under both open source and commercial licences.
Lars Knoll,Chief Maintainer of Qt Project,Digia commented:"I look forward to the exciting next chapter for Qt together with Digia.Qt 5 Beta was released during the acquisition process and we are working hard to reach a final release within the next months."
Tommi Laitinen,SVP,International Products,Digia,commented: "Our intention is to continue to work towards the goal set out by Trolltech,Qt's originators,to develop a framework that enables users to write code once and deploy everywhere.Adding support for Android and iOS,together with the most widely used embedded operating systems,will give us the potential to target hundreds of millions of products and to help make Qt the dominant force in the software development world. "
