[dot] Qt Everywhere: 4.5 To Be Relicensed As LGPL

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1231920504/

From: Jonathan Riddell <>
Dept: freedom-to-restrict
Date: Wednesday 14/Jan/2009, @00:08

Qt Everywhere: 4.5 To Be Relicensed As LGPL
===========================================

   Nokia has announced
[http://www.qtsoftware.com/about/news/lgpl-license-option-added-to-qt]
that starting with version 4.5, Qt [http://www.qtsoftware.com] will be
available under the LGPL 2.1.  From the announcement,  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. With these changes, developers will be
able to actively drive the  evolution of the Qt framework.  This
exciting change, made with consultation of the  KDE Free Qt Foundation
[http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php], should encourage
KDE and Qt use among commercial and proprietary developers and makes the
philosophy of "Qt Everywhere" complete.

     Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President of Devices at Nokia expands,
  "By opening Qt&#8217;s licensing model and encouraging more
contributions, Qt users  will have more of a stake in the development of
Qt, which will in turn  encourage wider adoption."
     The change in licensing for Qt is happening under the mantra "Qt 
Everywhere" and is a step to remove any and all possible blocking
objections  for not using Qt. Nokia explains further,
  Qt will be available under the LGPL version 2.1 with the upcoming Qt
4.5  release. Qt will also continue to be licensed under commercial
license terms,  as well as the GPL, version 3.0.
     Nokia will also be opening up the development of Qt. A clear path
for the  extension of external contributions is currently being built,
including  publicly available source code repositories and access to the
same level of  support, independent of the license.

     The simple fact behind this is that Nokia is less reliant on the 
income from Qt licensing than Trolltech (now Qt Software) was, and this
has  given Qt Software more room to approach the market with more
permissive  licensing strategies in order to increase adoption of the Qt
toolkit.   This is part of the 10x growth target announced at last
year's Akademy to achieve ten times as many developers and ten times as
many free software community users.   Or as KDE and Qt developer Thiago
Maciera put it "we want KDE to be ten times as big".

     While kdelibs has always been available under the LGPL, this marks
the first  time that both Qt and kdelibs will both be available under
the LGPL. This will help make the licensing of KDE's libraries more
permissive, flexible  and coherent.  KDE's licensing is summarised on
TechBase
[http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Policies/Licensing_Policy], 
and can be described as "LGPL or equivalent for libraries, GPL 
otherwise".

     Meanwhile, Nokia reiterates their commitment to a commercially
viable and,  technology-wise, best-of-breed toolkit. In fact, the
performance and   functionality improvements that can be seen in the
upcoming Qt 4.5 release are  impressive. Running KDE 4.2 with Qt 4.5 is
already being tested by several  engineers inside Qt software, which has
resulted in a number of bug fixes in  both KDE and Qt. Independent of
the licensing changes, the KDE release team  plans to update the version
of Qt in KDE's development tree (qt-copy) shortly  to snapshots of Qt
4.5 which is due to be released in March.

     All-in-all today's news means tremendous things for Free and Open
Source software. The  possibility of extending the reach of all of our
work is exciting in and of  itself, and this announcement could lead to
a veritable explosion of Qt and  KDE adoption.