Nokia intends to acquire Trolltech

Nokia, the biggest mobile phone manufacturer, announced its intention to acquire Trolltech, maker of the famous Qt toolkit, but also Qtopia, the mobile application platform. QT is available under the GPL, and widely used by free and open source programmers, most notably as the base of the KDE desktop environment. Nokia intends to use Trolltech's cross platform experience to boost its S40 and S60 mobile phone platforms, based on Symbian, the leading mobile phone operating system, which is not open source.

Although Nokia announced plans to continue the development of Trolltech's products, there are clearly some conflicts in sight. Maemo, Nokia's linux based platform used in their internet tablet N800 and N810, is based on the GTK toolkit, another open source toolkit used in the Gnome desktop environment. Qtopia can also be seen as a competitor of both Maemo and S60.

The availability of Qt to free and open source developers is garanteed though, thanks to the KDE free Qt foundation, founded by Trolltech and KDE in 1998.