Free Licenses For Qt Platform: Nokia

On Wednesday, Nokia made a move to boost its developer ecosystem by offering its Qt user interface and application framework under the Lesser General Public License.

This user interface is a cross platform framework based on C++ that can be used to build application and framework for PCs, set top boxes, and all of the above for mobile phones. With the help of Qt, programmer can built a program with can work on multiple platform with minimal adjustments for a specific platform. It is offered by Nokia owned Qt Software, and cross platform applications that are Qt include Google Earth, Skype, Opera and Last.fm.

Previously, toolkit has been available under the General Public License, as well as a commercial license. Company said LGPL move was made to meant to lower the barrier of entry and boost adoption rate were some key point in mind.

"Nokia is making significant contributions to open source communities through ongoing work with Qt, its contribution of Symbian OS and S60 to the Symbian Foundation, and open development of the Maemo platform," said Kai Oistamo, Nokia's executive VP of devices, in a statement. "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."

In an Qt blog, the company said it wold take multiple steps to make Qt more user friendly with the open source software community. Nokia is going to open wide door for Qt source code by engaging more developer on work, will try to reduce the overhead needed to make submission, and will launch a new Web infrastructure to support contributions.

With the releases on Qt 4.5 LGPL license will be available, which is expected for March, the company said. Not only this Qt 4.5 will support for WebKit and performance improvements even more better. No side effect on previous version by all this moves.