Nokia Hopes to Increase Adoption of Qt with Additional Licensing Option

Nokia looks to increase developer flexibility with its Qt framework by adding the LGPL Open Source Licensing option to it.

The 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.

This move to the LGPL will provide more abilities for developers to use and extend the Qt framework for their projects. In addition to this flexibility, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available from the newly launched website www.qtsoftware.com.

Qt 4.5 will be available under commercial licensing terms, while licensing for previous versions of Qt remains unchanged (GPLv2). Service offerings for Qt will be expanded to ensure that all Qt development projects can have access to the same levels of support, independent of the selected license.

More About Qt

Qt is a part of the Qtopia product offering that was created by Trolltech, a company that was purchased by Nokia in 2008. Qt has been rolled into several upcoming projects, including the Maemo 5 Linux operating system which is used on Nokia's Internet Tablet devices.

For more information about this change in the licensing framework, or to download Qt and associated tools, visit the new Qt Software website.