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The Qt Project is an open collaboration effort to coordinate the development of the Qt software framework. Initially founded by Nokia in 2011, the project is now led by
The Qt Company The Qt Company (pronounced "cute"; formerly Trolltech and Quasar Technologies) is a software company based in Espoo, Finland. It oversees the development of its Qt application framework within the Qt Project. It was formed following the acqui ...
.


History

Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng (the original developers of Qt and the CEO and President, respectively, of
Trolltech The Qt Company (pronounced "cute"; formerly Trolltech and Quasar Technologies) is a software company based in Espoo, Finland. It oversees the development of its Qt application framework within the Qt Project. It was formed following the acqui ...
) 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 the source code of 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 The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft ( ...
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 The KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC) was an umbrella term for the desktop environment plus a range of included applications produced by KDE. From its 1.0 release in July 1998 until the release of version 4.4 in February 2010, the Software Compi ...
was going to become one of the leading
desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a grap ...
s for Linux. As it was based on Qt, many people in the
free software movement The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the ...
worried that an essential piece of one of their major operating systems would be proprietary. With the release of Qt 2.0, the license was changed to the
Q Public License The Q Public License (QPL) is a non-copyleft license, created by Trolltech for its free edition of the Qt. It was used until Qt 3.0, as Trolltech toolkit version 4.0 was released under GPL version 2. It fails the Debian Free Software Guidelin ...
(QPL), a free software license but one regarded by the
Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft ( ...
as incompatible with the GPL. A compromise was found 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 a period of 12 months. In 2000, Qt 2.2 was released under the GPL v2, ending all controversy regarding GPL compatibility. On 28 January 2008 Nokia announced to acquire Trolltech. On 14 January 2009 Qt version 4.5 was relicensed, adding
LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their ow ...
as licensing option. The Qt Project was founded on 21 October 2011. In August 2012 Digia announced to acquire all rights to Qt and take Nokia's role within the Qt Project.


Governance

The Qt Project is not a separate legal entity or organization; Digia retains all trademarks around Qt. Qt's Open Governance is modelled after WebKit's. Decision-making takes place in a process the project describes as "lazy consensus". The project facilitates online communication among its developers and community members through public forums, mailing lists, and wiki pages.


Participating organizations

Aside from the project leader Digia and various individuals, a number of other organizations participate in the Qt Project. Second-largest Qt contributor is KDAB, a Swedish Qt consulting company. KDAB is involved in many areas, including maintenance of several components. KDAB together with RIM/BlackBerry are maintaining the QNX and
BlackBerry 10 BlackBerry 10 is a discontinued proprietary mobile operating system for the BlackBerry line of smartphones, both developed by BlackBerry Limited (formerly Research In Motion). BlackBerry 10 is based on QNX, a Unix-like operating system that was ...
ports of Qt. Another big participator is Intel, contributing for example Wayland support.
AudioCodes AudioCodes Ltd. is a provider of advanced communications software, products and productivity solutions. Its services enable enterprises and service providers to build and operate all-IP voice networks for unified communications (UC), contact cen ...
maintains IBM ClearCase support in Qt Creator. Many contributions also come from the
KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...
community, which is oftentimes adding features from their
KDE Frameworks KDE Frameworks is a collection of libraries and software frameworks readily available to any Qt-based software stacks or applications on multiple operating systems. Featuring frequently needed functionality solutions like hardware integration, fi ...
upstream into Qt.


See also

* KDE e.V.


References


External links

* *
Qt Marketplace
* * (updated weekly) {{KDE Free software projects