Nokia to increase adoption of Qt with new licensing option

Nokia announced that its Qt cross-platform user interface (UI) and application framework for desktop and embedded platforms will be available under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 license from the release of Qt 4.5, scheduled for March 2009. Previously, Qt has been made available to the open source community under the General Public License (GPL) license. In addition, Qt will now be available from the new domain, www.qtsoftware.com.
The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and 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 to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework.
"Qt is used extensively in Kubuntu and KDE applications," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project. "Qt's new licensing terms will help us deliver ever more 'lustful' applications to users. Nokia's continued investment in cross-platform Qt libraries, and the Linux platform, is a major driver of innovation in the free software desktop and mobile device stack."
Qt Software, formerly Trolltech, was acquired by Nokia in June 2008. For more details about Qt Software and its new licensing model, please visit www.qtsoftware.com .