Nokia LGPLs Qt

[Tsuroerusu]

Espoo, Finland -- Nokia today announced that its 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 2009. Previously, Qt has been made available to the open source community under the General Public License (GPL) license. In addition, Qt will now be available from the new domain, www.qtsoftware.com.

Source: http://www.qtsoftware.com/about/news/lg ... dded-to-qt

In my opnion, Nokia just undermined the only argument GTK advocates might have had in favor of GTK. While I'm not a developer myself, the impression I get is that Qt is far superior technically, if anybody has experience with both, I'd of course like to hear your opinions.

[Patrick]

Video from Trolltech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsTIIQocSqs

So in effect Nokia is basically ending the requirement of purchasing a commercial Qt license for non opensource programs that use the qt toolkit.

When I contacted Trolltech a couple months ago they quoted me the following for a "non Free" single developer license:
$3700 for a single platform
$5300 for multi platform

This document does a pretty good job explaining the implications of switching to LGPL:
http://www.ics.com/files/docs/Qt_LGPL.pdf

[jstgtpaid]

This is HUGE. I can't believe that I have not seen this all over the news... Wow...

[Patrick]

More reactions:
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/Qt-S ... 5--/112414
http://dot.kde.org/1231920504/
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/01/qt-goes-lgpl.html

[dpkgregor]

Awesome stuff!