- Sunday, 8 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
What's the definition of a heatsink for a hot journalist? Answer: the local boozer
Nokia to licence Qt under the LGPL
FINNISH MOBILE phone giant Nokia has announced that it will make the Qt framework available under the Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) with Qt 4.5, planned for March.
Qt is a large cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI) and applications framework for desktop and embedded software development.
In addition to Nokia's use of Qt in its embedded software for mobile phones, Qt provides the foundation for the K Desktop Environment (KDE) available in many Linux distributions. Qt is also used in Google Earth and by Linden Labs for developing the hugely successful virtual world Second Life.
Previously Qt has been available under the General Public Licence (GPL) for free software development, as well as under an expensive ($4,950 per developer) commercial licence for proprietary software development.
Nokia's announcement explains, "The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities."
Nokia Executive Vice President, Devices, Kai Öistämö, said, "By moving to LGPL, opening Qt’s source code repositories and encouraging more contributions, Qt users will have more of a stake in the development of Qt, which will in turn encourage wider adoption." Nokia hopes to leverage Qt improvements (PDF) across its Symbian OS and other mobile platform initiatives without having to rewrite source code in clean-room development environments.
The move is significant because the LGPL permits commercial software development shops to dynamically link their proprietary, closed source software to the free software libraries licenced under its terms, whereas the GPL does not. Commercial licences are still available.
Nokia, the world's largest cellphone manufacturer, bought Trolltech, the developer of Qt, not quite a year ago, and announced that it planned to licence Qt as open source software.
This announcement fulfills Nokia's pledge. More details are available at its Qt FAQ page. µ
L'Inq
Qt Software
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
its not theirs so they cant change the license.
Qt is a very good framework, much nicer to work with than MS' efforts. The cost to deploy Qt on non-GPL platforms has held it back.
@Tom - yes they can, Nokia bought Trolltech, who made Qt - Trolltech also required copyright assignment for changes made to be incorporated back into Qt (although interestingly, Nokia are no longer requiring such copyright assignment, just a license).
... they're also putting the source into a Git repository.
What ... is no-one else excited about that?