Qt 4.5 to be offered under LGPL 2.1 starting from March; Nokia hopes for increased adoption

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) announced that its Qt cross-platform UI and application framework for desktop and embedded platforms will be available under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 license from the release of Qt 4.5, scheduled for March 2009. The idea is to entice developers to adopt the platform by providing them with more permissive licensing. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities.

This, however, doesn’t mean commercial licensing is dead. Quite the contrary, interested parties will be able to purchase the license in case they have some special needs (I’m not quite sure how this works). Furthermore, licensing for previous versions of Qt will remain unchanged.

Commenting on the announcement, Nokia-Qt Software’s Sebastian Nystrom said: “Broader use of Qt by even more leading companies will result in valuable feedback and increased contributions, ensuring that Qt remains the best-in-class, cross-platform UI and application framework. 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.

Previously, Qt has been made available to the open source community under the General Public License (GPL) license.