 | |
| Founded | 21 October 2011 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Nokia |
| Type | Community |
| Focus | Free software |
| Products | Qt, Qt Creator |
| Method | Development and documentation |
| Website | The Qt Company |
The Qt Project is an open collaboration effort to coordinate the development of the Qt software framework. Initially founded by Nokia in 2011, [1] the project is now led by The Qt Company. [2]
Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng (the original developers of Qt and the CEO and President, respectively, of Trolltech) began development of "Qt" in 1991, three years before the company was incorporated as Quasar Technologies, then changed the name to Troll Tech and then to Trolltech. [3]
Until version 1.45 the source code of Qt was released under the Qt Free Edition License. [4] This was viewed as not compliant with the open source principle by the Open Source Initiative and the free software definition by Free Software Foundation because, while the source was available, it did not allow the redistribution of modified versions.
Controversy arose around 1998 when it became clear that KDE's K Desktop Environment was going to become one of the leading desktop environments for Linux. As it was based on Qt, many people in the free software movement worried that an essential piece of one of their major operating systems would be proprietary.
With the release of Qt 2.0, the license was changed to the Q Public License (QPL), a free software license but one regarded by the Free Software Foundation as incompatible with the GPL. A compromise was found between KDE and Trolltech whereby Qt would not be able to fall under a more restrictive license than the QPL, even if Trolltech was bought out or went bankrupt. This led to the creation of the KDE Free Qt Foundation which guarantees that Qt would fall under a BSD-style license should no free/open source version of Qt be released during a period of 12 months. [5]
In 2000, Qt 2.2 was released under the GPL v2, ending all controversy regarding GPL compatibility. [6]
On 28 January 2008 Nokia announced to acquire Trolltech. [7] [8]
On 14 January 2009 Qt version 4.5 was relicensed, adding LGPL as licensing option. [9]
The Qt Project was founded on 21 October 2011. [1] [10] In August 2012 Digia announced to acquire all rights to Qt and take Nokia's role within the Qt Project. [2]
The Qt Project is not a separate legal entity or organization; Digia retains all trademarks around Qt. [11] [12]
Qt's Open Governance is modelled after WebKit's. [13] [14]
Decision-making takes place in a process the project describes as "lazy consensus". [15]
The project facilitates online communication among its developers and community members through public forums, [16] mailing lists, [17] and wiki pages. [18]
Aside from the project leader Digia and various individuals, a number of other organizations participate in the Qt Project. [19] Second-largest Qt contributor is KDAB, a Swedish Qt consulting company. [20] KDAB is involved in many areas, including maintenance of several components. [21] [22] KDAB together with RIM/BlackBerry are maintaining the QNX and BlackBerry 10 ports of Qt. [19] [23]
Another big participator is Intel, contributing for example Wayland support. [24] AudioCodes maintains IBM ClearCase support in Qt Creator. [25]
Many contributions also come from the KDE community, which is oftentimes adding features from their KDE Frameworks upstream into Qt. [26] [27]
KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks, and a range of cross-platform applications such as Amarok, digiKam, and Krita that are designed to run on Unix and Unix-like operating systems, Microsoft Windows, and Android.
Qt is cross-platform software for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems with little or no change in the underlying codebase while still being a native application with native capabilities and speed.
The Qt Company is a software company based in Espoo, Finland. It oversees the development of its Qt application framework within the Qt Project. It was formed following the acquisition of Qt by Digia, but was later spun off into a separate, publicly traded company.
The Q Public License (QPL) is a non-copyleft license, created by Trolltech for its free edition of the Qt. It was used until Qt 3.0, as Trolltech toolkit version 4.0 was released under GPL version 2.
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.
VLC media player is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for desktop operating systems and mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS and iPadOS. VLC is also available on digital distribution platforms such as Apple's App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft Store.
Qt Extended is an application platform for embedded Linux-based mobile computing devices such as personal digital assistants, video projectors and mobile phones. It was initially developed by The Qt Company, at the time known as Qt Software and a subsidiary of Nokia. When they cancelled the project the free software portion of it was forked by the community and given the name Qt Extended Improved. The QtMoko Debian-based distribution is the natural successor to these projects as continued by the efforts of the Openmoko community.
LXDE is a free desktop environment with comparatively low resource requirements. This makes it especially suitable for use on older or resource-constrained personal computers such as netbooks or system on a chip computers.
License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.
A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) defines the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to a company/project, typically software under an open source license.
K Desktop Environment 1 was the inaugural series of releases of the K Desktop Environment. There were two major releases in this series.
The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Richard Stallman, for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.
FreeCAD is a general-purpose parametric 3D computer-aided design (CAD) modeler and a building information modeling (BIM) software application with finite element method (FEM) support. It is intended for mechanical engineering product design but also expands to a wider range of uses around engineering, such as architecture or electrical engineering. FreeCAD is free and open-source, under the LGPL-2.0-or-later license, and available for Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems. Users can extend the functionality of the software using the Python programming language.
The KDE Software Compilation was an umbrella term for the desktop environment plus a range of included applications produced by KDE. From its 1.0 release in July 1998 until the release of version 4.4 in February 2010, the Software Compilation was simply known as KDE, which stood for K Desktop Environment until the rebrand. The then called KDE SC was used from 4.4 onward until the final release 4.14 in July 2014. It consisted of the KDE Plasma 4 desktop and those KDE applications, whose development teams chose to follow the Software Compilation's release schedule. After that, the KDE SC was split into three separate product entities: KDE Plasma, KDE Frameworks and KDE Applications, each with their own independent release schedules.
LibreCAD is a computer-aided design (CAD) application for 2D design. It is free and open-source, and available for Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.
Maliit is an input method framework for computers with particular focus on implementing virtual keyboards. Designed mostly for touchscreen devices, Maliit allows the inputting of text without the presence of a physical keyboard. More advanced features such as word correction and prediction are also available.
Trojitá is a free software IMAP and SMTP email client developed using the Qt C++ library. The design goals of the maintainers are to develop a fast e-mail client which respects open standards, is cross-platform and uses the available resources very efficiently.
The latest version of Qt is 6.4.2 released on 5 January 2023.
Software relicensing is applied in open-source software development when software licenses of software modules are incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as copyrightable works, in source code as binary form, can contain contradictory clauses. These requirements can make it impossible to combine source code or content of several software works to create a new combined one.
KDE Projects are projects maintained by the KDE community, a group of people developing and advocating free software for everyday use, for example KDE Plasma and KDE Frameworks or applications such as Amarok, Krita or Digikam. There are also non-coding projects like designing the Breeze desktop theme and iconset, which is coordinated by KDE's Visual Design Group. Even non-Qt applications like GCompris, which started as a GTK-based application, or web-based projects like WikiToLearn are officially part of KDE.
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