Troll Tech AS has released version 2 of its Qt multi-platform C++ Graphical User Interface (GUI) framework. New features include support for application internationalization, formatted document display, themes and Unicode for non-European alphabets. The Qt library is designed to give application developers everything they need to build GUI applications for Unix/X11 and Microsoft Windows. It is an alternative to both Motif/Xt and Microsoft’s Foundation Class libraries.
Qt’s chief claim to fame, however, is that it used to be proprietary software. When the Linux GUI project KDE chose Qt as its toolkit, concerns over licensing led some developers to break away and found an all-open-source effort of their own. That effort became GNOME. Though Troll Tech released Qt under an approved open source license in November 1998, development has continued on both KDE and GNOME. Ironically, the long-term legacy of Qt may be a choice of interfaces for Linux, one of which is based on the Troll Tech tool, and the other of which is not.
