QT Application Framework Will Be Licensed Under LGPL Version 2.1
QT is a development framework that allows the deployment of applications without rewriting their code across multiple platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac and other. Starting from the version 4.5, QT will be released under the terms of LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) Version 2.1.
QT platform is also available under several other licensing types: Commercial, Open Source (GPL version 2 ), Educational and Academic License. Sebastian Nyström, the Vice President of Qt Software stated: “ We have some exciting news we’d like to share with the free software community: Qt will be licensed under the terms of the LGPL version 2.1 with the upcoming Qt 4.5 release, in addition to our standard GPL and commercial licenses. We are also pleased to announce that we are going to open up the Qt source code repository and also make it easier for the community to contribute to Qt.”
The opening of source code repository will attract more developers and eliminates the need of a copyright assignment. While the QT versions earlier than 4.5 will not have the LGPL Version 2.1 licensing type, the new QT releases will be also licensed under GPL ( General Public License) 3 specifications.
The QT platform for application development provides support for C++ and Java and has already been used for the creation of many popular open source applications: KDE, KOffice, VLC Media Player, Marble and more.
For future releases LGPL 3 license could be implemented for QT. The release of QT development platform is expected in March 2009. The LGPL 2.1 license type attributed to QT 4.5 represent a major step in the speeding up of the QT improvement and development with the help of the free software community.
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