Nokia (Trolltech) releases Qt under LGPL

Last year Nokia aquired the Norwegian company 'Trolltech' in order to gain access to their very popular cross plattform framework 'Qt'. Qt builds the foundation for the KDE desktop and has been able to gain a lot of very attractive developer features over the years. Just recently they added a strong graphical framework which comes in many ways very close to CoreAnimation (or rather the CALayer technology sans the animation features). One strong argument for Qt are the cross plattform possibilities. Qt works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and several mobile devices which makes it very, very interesting for developers toying with the idea of cross plattform development.

One severe problem has always been the restrictive Qt license. One could develop for free, as long as the resulting application was going to be released as open source. As soon as one would develop a commercial application, one had to buy a rather expensive (especially for indy developers) license.

Long story short: Nokia just released Qt under the LGPL license which means that one can build commercial applications using Qt, without having to buy said expensive licenses. This would allow many a developer to start developing his new application cross plattform instead of focusing on just one plattform. All in all, this could result in a greater variety of new Mac OS X compatible applications, as the usage of Qt for a Windows application would automatically result in Mac and Linux versions as well.