[Hampshire] untended consequences of Nokia buyout

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Author: Joseph Bennie
Date:  
To: General Linux/Unix community List, hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk User Group
Subject: [Hampshire] untended consequences of Nokia buyout
hi all

while dabbling this morning with some app prototyping I opened the QT Studio tools and the following thought ran through my head

"Nokia owns QT -> microsoft just bought Nokia and most of their patents -> OK its Dual licence but its not going to stop MS Legal thinking they can throw stones at us … and actually QT is used a lot!, a lot of industrial apps and OS apps are built on it, and this is classic ARM territory -> MS want to rule that space like they prev ruled desktops -> I foresee the next battle ground"

Am I thinking about this too hard or will this acquisitions be of significant and detrimental consequence for QT derived works.

Should any of the FSF groups etc be raising potential concerns to respective competition authorities that highlight that QT related patents could be used to restrict the development models used for the linux desktop [ and by extension any graphics based ecosystem*] (fyi my concern is that the designs for api and signalling will be more impactful than the actual visual widgets, as some of those designs are likely also present in Gnome etc)

Welcome any thought.. especially from people more knowledgable about QT.

* = the memo team, if i recall was a strong contributor to some of the directfb work which is an important alternative to the X subsystems for draw rendering… mostly used for i.e. mobiles and tablets.

Jay


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