Bonuses offered by Nokia to MeeGo-based employees to stay
Vaibhav Sharma is amongst those reporting that Nokia is offering its MeeGo-focused staff cash incentives to remain with the company: According to the Finnish site, Taloussanomat, Nokia is offering its in-house MeeGo devs a salary plus 50% bonus to continue with the company and help avoid a mass exodus after the Feb 11 announcement that Nokia was moving to Windows Phone as its primary operating system.
Nokia sells Qt licencing business
After Nokia acquired Trolltech and Qt, they made it available under the LGPL open source license - a common choice for frameworks and libraries. However, it is still available, with support, under a commercial license. Nokia are in the process of selling that business to Digia: Many organizations which want to use Qt for their business applications choose commercial licenses, for a variety of reasons. These include restrictions in using open source licensed software in industries such as defense & aerospace, or the need to provide product warranties & indemnities such as in the medical device industry. Others choose a commercial relationship for access to Qt professional support and services to ensure successful development of their projects.
However, these professional services are not core business activities for Nokia, so since the introduction of the LGPL license for Qt in 2009 we have been actively working to grow the number of companies providing Qt services. In 2010 we began the search for a company we could work with to serve the commercial licensees in the Qt community. We have now concluded that search and chosen to work with Digia. As a consequence, Digia will acquire the Qt Commercial software licensing and professional services business from Nokia, with the transaction expected to close by the end of March 2011. It is unclear whether this is related to Nokia's change in strategy. Either way, the decision makes sense for Nokia.