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Submission + - Nokia/Trolltech to License Qt as LGPL 1

Submitted by CarpetShark on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @07:22AM

CarpetShark writes: Following their acquisition by Nokia, Trolltech have added an LGPL licensing option to Qt. Qt (pronounced "cute", not "Q.T."), the main widget and OS abstraction layer used by KDE and many other Free Software projects, is roughly equivalent to the GTK+ library within GNOME. However, GTK+ has been LGPL from the beginning, which has, arguably, led to increased support from corporations such as Sun etc. This raises interesting questions on the future of Qt (increased contributions?), the future of KDE (more corporate contributions and sponsorship?), and also the future of interactions between KDE and GNOME (since they'll be using more compatible licenses).

Submission + - Nokia to LGPL Qt

Submitted by

jryland

on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @06:54AM

jryland writes: "It appears that Nokia is planning to release Qt 4.5 under the LGPL as well as under commercial licensing and the GPL. I first got the news today with an email from Nokia to customers and found an article here on Arstechnica about the news:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090114-nokia-qt-lgpl-switch-huge-win-for-cross-platform-development.html

http://www.trolltech.com/ appears to now redirect to http://www.qtsoftware.com/ however it doesn't confirm this news as far as I can tell at this time.

This is pretty big news for the FOSS world. I wonder how this will impact many things. Comment with what you think will happen because of this. I can imagine it will eliminate any license arguments in the comparisons of Qt with other toolkits and the relative technical merits will be weighed and used to judge each toolkit rather than simply a comparison of license terms (although Qt appears that it will still have an additional commercial option available presumably so that companies can keep their modifications to Qt to themselves).

I personally think it will significantly increase the usage of Qt and much more software will be written using it. However I wonder how much of the software will be commercial software for Windows and Mac using the LGPL version of Qt which will provide little or no benefit to Linux users?"

Comment Re:To be fair to China (Score 5, Funny) 325

by tyle on Saturday August 23, 2008 @05:42AM (#24717035) Attached to: China Blocks iTunes

Blocking an album containing Alanis Morissette, Garbage, Moby and Sting is probably preventing human rights violations as much as it contributes to them. Isn't that ironic?

It's like rain on your wedding day, It's a free ride when you've already paid, It's the good advice that you just didn't take, Who would've thought ... it figures

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