Qt Project
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| Founded | 21 October 2011 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Nokia |
| Type | Community |
| Focus | Free software |
| Products | Qt, Qt Creator |
| Method | Development and documentation |
| Website | The Qt Company |
The Qt Project is a project to co-ordinate the development of the Qt software framework. The project was founded by Nokia, and has been now led by Digia’s subsidiary The Qt Company since it acquired Qt software technologies, trademarks, and personnel from Nokia.
Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng (the original developers of Qt and the CEO and President, respectively, of Trolltech) began development of "Qt" in 1991, three years before the company was incorporated as Quasar Technologies, then changed the name to Troll Tech and then to Trolltech.
Until version 1.45, source code for Qt was released under the Qt Free Edition License. This was viewed as not compliant with the open source principle by the Open Source Initiative and the free software definition by Free Software Foundation because, while the source was available, it did not allow the redistribution of modified versions.
Controversy arose around 1998 when it became clear that KDE’s K Desktop Environment was going to become one of the leading desktop environments for Linux. As it was based on Qt, many people in the free software movement worried that an essential piece of one of their major operating systems would be proprietary.
With the release of version 2.0 of the toolkit, the license was changed to the Q Public License (QPL), a free software license but one regarded by the Free Software Foundation as incompatible with the GPL. Compromises were sought between KDE and Trolltech whereby Qt would not be able to fall under a more restrictive license than the QPL, even if Trolltech was bought out or went bankrupt. This led to the creation of the KDE Free Qt Foundation which guarantees that Qt would fall under a BSD-style license should no free/open source version of Qt be released during 12 months.
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