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Comment by nicholassmith | Hacker News Reader

I wonder who will be a candidate for buying it, depends how much Nokia will want to offload it for.

Google has used it for some client apps (Earth, MusicManager). Skype uses it (though post-MS that seems subject to change). Intel already employs some of the senior Qt people.

I think the most likely resting place will be a non-profit of some sort along the lines of the Mozilla foundation.

There is already a nonprofit reponsible for the project infrastructure.

http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/12/qt-project/

And a governeance model that looks open to the community.

http://qt-project.org/wiki/The_Qt_Governance_Model

I'd bet on RIM if they still have enough cash. They also integrate QT for their next platform (if it ever gets to see the light of day)

I think they already have their work cut out of their next platform without throwing yet another integration into it.

Its not "yet another integration", Qt is already the base component of their Cascades framework which is RIM's preferred way of building BB10 apps.

Keep in mind that Nokia already sold off the commerical licensing rights to QT. I'm not sure how a sale would affect that.

http://www.digia.com/en/Qt/

Yep, Troll Tech (the company behind Qt before Nokia bought them) was making an annual revenue of about 25M€. I'm supposing this was partly licensing, and partly support and training

http://blogs.kde.org/node/3235/

With the licensing business gone through move to LGPL licensing and the Digia deal it would at least be hard to make Qt a business on its own again. So the probable acquirers are companies that are building products on Qt, like RIM or maybe some of the big embedded players. Intel would also be a possibility, I imagine.

I think Perforce should buy it.

And bring back P4Win :)

Embarc.. (oh, whoever owns Delphi right now, hard to even spell) who's been struggling for multiplatform solutions for some time.

Though I'd not bet on it. Their management seems to have made all the wrong decisions in product development in the last 10+ years and has ridden Delphi, a platform which was always way ahead of its time, into irrelevance.

Embarcadero Technologies (not so foreign a word in California: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarcadero_%28San_Francisco%29)

Autodesk - Maya, MotionBuilder, etc. - all based on Qt Sony uses it, at least the tools I've seen from them. Probably lots of other big companies do, but somehow avoid or it's too cheap for them to use it. I'm still puzzled how they were able to survive that long...

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