Qt now fully part of Digia

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We reported in August that Digia was to acquire the Qt development framework from Nokia. As of today, the handover has been completed. Digia has a history of involvement with Qt and so the transition has widely been seen as a natural one, since Nokia is winding down Symbian, has abandoned MeeGo and fully adopted Windows Phone. As we said in our original report, the acquisition will not have a significant effect on the Symbian world, which is likely to remain on the current Qt/QML versions. Digia reaffirms in its blog post that the licencing structure of Qt will not change, it will still be available under commercial, LGPL and GPL licences. 

Digia also noted in its blog post that despite today being 'Day 1' with Qt, the continuous integration script that makes sure merge commits are handled properly in the Qt repository is still running on Nokia systems, and that the process of transferring it to Digia's data centres is still underway. Digia is also in the process of switching to a different continuous integration tool called Jenkins.

The gatekeeper for the quality of Qt is our continuous integration, a.k.a CI, system. It is a combination of high build capacity and sophisticated procedures for constantly verifying that all modifications done to Qt are working correctly. The system is currently running at Nokia and we are in process of transferring it to the Digia data center. In addition to transferring the system, we are also changing the main tool to Jenkins. After this change, it will be much easier than before to connect external build agents to the Qt Project CI system, which helps in validating additional platforms.

Nokia's flag taken down outside of Qt HQ!

Looking ahead to the future of Qt, Digia is keen to open the framework up to the Android and iOS mobile platforms, which are the obvious targets given the impending exit of Symbian and lack of support in Windows Phone.

For iOS there is a Qt Labs research project done by Eike Ziller (now part of Digia Qt R&D) to run Qt on iOS. Even though it is more a proof of concept, than a full platform port, it nicely shows what is possible already with Qt 4.8. There also exists a commercial-only Qt 4.8 iOS plugin available from Mediator Software , which can be leveraged to create Qt 4.8 based applications for iOS. Although not as complete as the Android port, it can already be used for many kinds of Qt applications. We will continue discussions to see whether it would be possible to leverage it within the Qt Project. We will also need to decide how to tackle the current iOS restrictions that hinder use of Qt Quick.

Our main focus for developing Android and iOS support is on Qt 5. We will start the work on top of Qt 5.0, within the Qt Project, and target having these available for prime time in conjunction with the Qt 5.1 scheduled release for ~ Q2/2013. However, as the currently available Qt 4.8 based Android and iOS projects prove, it is possible to create applications already with 4.8 and 5.0.


Source / Credit: Qt Blog