Nokia is changing the name of its open source software division – once known as Trolltech – again. Nokia acquired Trolltech in 2008 for $150 million and brought the company’s technology into Nokia under the name Qt Software.
Qt was/is Trolltech’s primary technology and is the open source GUI toolkit behind KDE (and in many ways WebKit too) – it’s also a key part of Nokia’s open source mobile phone strategy moving forward.
Now Qt Software is being renamed as Qt Development Frameworks and the web address will change to http://qt.nokia.com.
Daniel Kihlberg, director of global sales, marketing, and services for Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks, explains the rationale behind the selection of the name and domain:
“We want to increase the use of Qt by mobile developers and to achieve this we’ve strengthened our name’s link to the Nokia brand,” Daniel Kihlberg, director of global sales, marketing, and services for Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks said in a statement. “The progress of our new Qt for S60 product and our future involvement in Maemo are examples of how Qt will reach out to mobile developers in addition to desktop and web developers. We selected Qt Development Frameworks because at the end of the day, our goal is to provide developers with the best framework: Qt.”
To me this is a TomAYto/TomAHto change.
Calling it Software versus a Framework is a semantic change that doesn’t change the underlying technology at all. For those that don’t know Qt – sure calling it a framework is better than just calling it software. But then again couldn’t it have just been a software framework?
