Successful Software

Telecoms giant Nokia are to acquire Trolltech, the company behind leading cross-platform toolkit Qt. As a fan and long time user of Qt this makes me a little nervous. I hope it will lead to more investment in Qt and lower maintenance fees. The opposite could happen of course. It isn’t unknown for a large company to buy a good product and then ruin it (the purchase of Purify by Rational springs to mind). At least I have the full source code for Qt if it all goes to hell in a handbasket. I learnt long ago (the hard way) that you should never depend on a third party libraries if you don’t have the source.