[Qt-interest] [Ann] Nokia to license Qt under LGPL

[nobody at trolltech.com]

We have some exciting news we'd like to share with you: 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.

Adding LGPL version 2.1 will greatly increase adoption of Qt across
Windows, Linux, embedded Linux, Mac, S60, Windows CE, maemo, and Ovi
web services. Having a larger number of users, including Nokia
developers, providing feedback and contributions will help Qt remain a
cutting edge, robust UI and application framework.

Going forward we will speed up the development of Qt using additional
resources and work in even closer cooperation with the free software
community. We will do this in a number of ways, including:

- Employing more Qt developers
- Opening our source code repository
- Reducing the overhead needed to make a submission, including no
longer requiring copyright assignments.
- Launching a new web infrastructure to support contributions later
this year.

As we know that license versions are important for many in the free
software community, we wanted to also take the opportunity to provide
some highlights of our upcoming changes:

- Versions of Qt prior to 4.5 are not impacted by this announcement
- We will continue to support the GPL version 2 through the newly added
LGPL version 2.1 license, as it allows for the automatic conversion to
the GPL.
- We will continue to release Qt under GPL 3

As a first step we have selected LGPL version 2.1 as this is the
version of the LGPL that best fits our purposes and we are most
comfortable with at this point in time. We will continue to evaluate
the adoption, use and legal interpretation of LGPL version 3 by the
community and may use this version of the LGPL for future releases.

Finally, we will open the Qt repositories and provide more information
regarding how interested parties can contribute to Qt with the release
of Qt 4.5, which is scheduled for March. To learn more, please visit
the announcement landing page at http://qtsoftware.com/licensing.

Sincerely,



Sebastian Nyström
Vice President, Qt Software