Nokia adds less restrictive licensing option to Qt development platform

A growing number of general purpose applications, including Adobe's latest version of Photoshop Elements, are being built upon an open source software platform that was originally developed by a company called Trolltech, and that was originally marketed as a tool for developing "widgets." That may have been a misnomer; while it certainly provides widgets, the Qt platform builds an underlying graphical model for programs that can be deployed across Windows, Linux, and Macs on the desktop, and even on smartphone OSes.

It's for that reason that Nokia acquired Trolltech last year, resulting in the leading cell phone manufacturer having its first desktop software platform. The deal was approved by the European Commission last June, though developers remained skeptical about how seriously committed Nokia would be to maintaining the cross-platform aspect of Qt.

Yesterday, they got their answer: Nokia announced it will add a licensing option to Qt, enabling third parties to license the platform and use it in their own development without their work being considered a "derivative" of the platform. Those terms are permitted by an older version (v. 2.1) of the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Under the GPL that had been Qt's only open source licensing option up to now, new code that linked to Qt was considered derivative code, and therefore had to be released under the GPL's restrictions. A commercial licensing option enabled waiving of those restrictions.

The move is being widely applauded in the community. In an open letter to developers yesterday, Qt sales director Tom Miller wrote, "By offering Qt under LGPL version 2.1 license terms alongside today's licensing options Nokia hopes to: facilitate wider adoption of Qt across industries, desktop, web and embedded platforms; establish Qt as a de facto standard for application development; receive more valuable feedback and increased user contributions to ensure that Qt remains the best-in-class, cross-platform framework; [and] extend Nokia existing platform commitment to the open source community."

Qt Software released its most recent beta of the platform's IDE just last month.