Nokia has announced that its Qt cross-platform user interface and application framework for desktop and embedded platforms will be available under the Lesser General Public License version 2.1 license from the release of Qt 4.5, scheduled for March 2009.
Previously, Qt has been made available to the open source community under the general public license.
According to the company, the move to Lesser General Public License (LGPL) licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available.
Qt 4.5 will also be available under commercial licensing terms, while licensing for previous versions of Qt remains unchanged.
Sebastian Nystrom, vice president for Qt Software at Nokia, said: The accelerated development of Qt will allow developers, including Nokia, to deliver better devices and applications, reduce time to market and enable a wider deployment base for their solutions.
Kai Oistamo, Executive Vice President of Devices at Nokia, said: By moving to LGPL, opening Qt’s source code repositories and encouraging more contributions, Qt users will have more of a stake in the development of Qt, which will in turn encourage wider adoption. Nokia will be able to leverage improvements in Qt across S60 on Symbian OS, Maemo and OVI services without rewriting the source code.
