The KDE Free Qt Foundation has celebrated its 25th anniversary with a pledge to continue protecting the future of Qt, both as open source and as a proprietary and commercially supported offering.

Qt is a cross-platform application and UI software development framework that lets you create native apps for desktop, embedded or mobile platforms. Qt started life as a widget library written in C+ with bindings to other languages including Python, Rust, Go, Java and JavaScript.

Qt's advantages are its wide set of user interface and data visualization modules. According to the KDE Free Qt Foundation, Qt's dual licensing strategy is another key element in its success: Qt is available as free software for open source, but it is also available under a paid license for proprietary software development.

KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. The KDE Free Qt Foundation is an organization with the purpose of securing the availability of the Qt toolkit for the development of Free Software and in particular for the development of KDE software.

The Foundation was originally founded by Trolltech and the KDE e.V. in 1998. After Nokia bought Trolltech, the statutes were updated, and in July 2009, the agreement was again updated to respond both to the relicensing of Qt to the LGPL license and to the merger of Trolltech into Nokia. In October 2011, Nokia launched the Qt Project, allowing both companies and individuals to contribute to the development of Qt under open governance terms.

The Foundation has license agreements with The Qt Company, Digia and Nokia which ensure that the Qt will continue to be available as Free Software. Should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses.

More Information

KDE Free Qt Foundation

Related Articles

Qt Moving To Commercial-Only LTS

Qt 6 Released

Qt for Python Released

Qt May Move To Paid Model  

Digia Buys Qt Development Platform

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info