Digia has announced the name of the new company that will be the home of the Qt cross- application framework.

The new company will be called The Qt Company, which at least has the advantage of being clear.

Digia, the current owners of Qt, decided Qt needed to have a single home for both the commercial and open source product development.

When the decision to spin Qt out of Digia was announced, Qt’s chief architect Lars Knoll said in a blog post that currently the commercial and open source sides of Qt have drifted apart, adding

“The installers and product packages for the open source and enterprise versions are different, and there is a complete disconnect between qt-project.org and the commercial pages on qt.digia.com.”

He continued that

“In the long term, this split is helping nobody. The fragmentation actually weakens our ecosystem and makes it difficult to position Qt against competing technologies and tools."

The new company will, according to Knoll , mean the developers will be able

“to put more focus on our Qt business operations to better position our beloved Qt technology in the software industry. We will now begin to use The Qt Company as our umbrella to market and promote Qt.”

The Qt Company is the fourth company in which Qt has been owned and developed. Having started life in Trolltech, Qt was part of the deal when Nokia took over Trolltech. Digia bought the commercial rights to Qt in 2011, and acquired all other Qt assets in 2012.

Although Qt is an open source project, Digia has been responsible for covering 85 percent of the costs of developing Qt. Digia is saying firmly that this is not a spin off, saying in a statement

"Qt has not been spun off. Digia has made an internal organization of assets and subsidiaries and Qt governance within Digia. Nothing else has been affected by this."

Alongside the announcement, details were released of a new commercial Qt offering for indie mobile developers. Writing about it in the blog post, Knoll said

“Many of you have been asking for it, and we have listened. On top of the new web site and company name, today, we are also releasing a brand new Indie Mobile package targeting Android, iOS and WinRT development."

You get the Qt libraries, Qt Creator, a commercial license and full development and deployment rights to the Android stores, App Store and Windows Marketplace (Note: the package doesn’t include support, commercial add-on features or Qt Cloud Services).

The new package is available for the price of 20€/$25 per month.

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