Qt Destined to Become the New Standard!

Today, January 14th, 2009, Nokia/Qt Software under the leadership of Sebastian Nyström, has taken a bold and perhaps unprecedented step in offering Qt under the LGPL license. Just about 12 months ago, all of us in the Qt development community were wondering whether the Nokia acquisition was going to be a good thing for Qt. The verdict is in, it was a great thing for the community. Only through the acquisition of Trolltech, by a company the size of Nokia, was it possible to take this step.

The availability of the LGPL version of Qt will prove to be a significant benefit to all of us by greatly expanding the supporting Qt eco-system, resulting in more Qt extensions/add-ons, additional platform ports, and greater numbers of skilled Qt developers.

The move from the GPL to the LGPL is a gift from Nokia to the open source community and more generally to the software development community. Qt is technically the best toolkit out there. There are others that were doing OK because they are free, but now that there is an LGPL, we have the best technology at the best price and Qt is now destined to become a standard.

At this point, I think we should also acknowledge Trolltech's founders - Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng, and great engineers like Matthias Ettrich, Lars Knoll and all the other Trolls and members of the KDE project that have contributed to Qt over the years. Thank you, you have jointly changed the way we program for at least the next decade.

Peter Winston
January 14, 2009

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