Company type | Public |
---|---|
Nasdaq Helsinki: QTCOM | |
Industry | Computer software |
Founded | 4 March 1994 (as Trolltech) |
Founders |
|
Headquarters | , |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
|
Products | Qt, Qt Creator, Qbs, PySide, Coco, Squish, Test Center |
Revenue | 180,743,000 Euro (2023) |
47,349,000 Euro (2023) | |
35,455,000 Euro (2023) | |
Number of employees | 775 (2023) |
Parent | Digia Nokia |
Website | www |
The Qt Company (pronounced "cute"; formerly Trolltech and Quasar Technologies) 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.
It has core R&D in Oslo, Norway, as well as large engineering teams in Berlin, Germany, and Oulu, Finland. The Qt Group operates in China, Finland, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Norway, the US, France, UK, Italy and India. [2]
Trolltech was founded by Eirik Chambe-Eng and Haavard Nord on 4 March 1994. They started writing Qt in 1991, and since then Qt has steadily expanded and improved.
In 2001 Trolltech introduced Qtopia which is based on Qt. Qtopia is an application platform for Linux-based devices such as mobile phones, portable media players, and home media. It is also used in many non-consumer products such as medical instruments and industrial devices. Qtopia Phone Edition was released in 2004, and their Greenphone smartphone is based on this platform.
Trolltech completed an initial public offering (IPO) on the Oslo Stock Exchange in July, 2006.
On 28 January 2008, Nokia Corporation announced that they had entered into an agreement to make a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech. [4] The total cost for Nokia was approximately €104 million. [5] [6] On 5 June 2008 Nokia's voluntary tender offer was approved for all the shares in Trolltech. By 17 June 2008, Nokia had completed its acquisition of Trolltech. On 30 September 2008, Trolltech was renamed as Qt Software, and Qtopia was renamed as Qt Extended. On 11 August 2009, the company's name was changed to Qt Development Frameworks. [7]
Nokia sold the commercial licensing business of Qt to Digia in March 2011. [8] The remainder of the assets were subsequently acquired by Digia in 2012.
In September 2014, Digia formed The Qt Company, a wholly owned subsidiary dedicated to the development and governance of the Qt platform. [9] In May 2016, the company went public on NASDAQ Helsinki as QTCOM. [10]
Qt Group's head office is located in Helsinki, Finland. The company has approximately 800 employees worldwide. [11]
The company’s CEO is Juha Varelius, [12] who previously served as the CEO of Digia from 2008 to 2016. [13]
The company provides software development platforms and frameworks, as well as expert consulting services. Its flagship product is Qt, a multi-platform Graphical User Interface (GUI) framework written in C++. Qt is popular with application developers using C++ but is supported by bindings for other programming languages too, such as Python. Qt also includes packages such as data structures and a networking library. The popular free and cross-platform KDE Plasma desktop environment and software compilation uses the Qt library. The company also employs several KDE developers.
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.
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, in the Helsinki metropolitan area, but the company's actual roots are in the Tampere region of Pirkanmaa. In 2020, Nokia employed approximately 92,000 people across over 100 countries, did business in more than 130 countries, and reported annual revenues of around €23 billion. Nokia is a public limited company listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki and New York Stock Exchange. It was the world's 415th-largest company measured by 2016 revenues, according to the Fortune Global 500, having peaked at 85th place in 2009. It is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.
Qt is cross-platform application development framework 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 Q Public License (QPL) is a non-copyleft license, created by the company Trolltech for its free software edition of the Qt toolkit and framework. It was used until Qt 3.0, until version 4.0 was released under the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.
Harri Porten is a software engineer. Porten, a KDE developer and former Trolltech employee, is the CEO of Froglogic, a consultancy company related to Qt development. He lives in Hamburg, Germany.
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.
WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as all web browsers on iOS and iPadOS. WebKit is also used by the PlayStation consoles starting with the PS3, the Tizen mobile operating systems, the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, Nintendo consoles starting with the 3DS Internet Browser, and the discontinued BlackBerry Browser.
Maemo is a software platform originally developed by Nokia, now developed by the community, for smartphones and Internet tablets. The platform comprises both the Maemo operating system and SDK. Maemo played a key role in Nokia's strategy to compete with Apple and Android, but ultimately failed to surpass both companies.Maemo is mostly based on open-source code and has been developed by Maemo Devices within Nokia in collaboration with many open-source projects such as the Linux kernel, Debian, and GNOME. Maemo is based on Debian and draws much of its GUI, frameworks, and libraries from the GNOME project. It uses the Matchbox window manager and the GTK-based Hildon framework as its GUI and application framework.
QtJambi is a Java binding of the cross-platform application framework Qt. It enables Java developers to use Qt within the Java programming language. In addition, the QtJambi generator can be used to create Java bindings for other Qt libraries and future versions of Qt. Unlike GTK, there are no Swing LAF implementations that use Qt for rendering.
Qbs is a cross-platform free and open-source software for managing the build process of software. It was designed to support large, complex projects, written in any number of programming languages, primarily C/C++.
K Desktop Environment 1 was the inaugural series of releases of the K Desktop Environment. There were two major releases in this series.
Qt Creator is a cross-platform C++, JavaScript, Python and QML integrated development environment (IDE) which simplifies GUI application development. It is part of the SDK for the Qt GUI application development framework and uses the Qt API, which encapsulates host OS GUI function calls. It includes a visual debugger and an integrated WYSIWYG GUI layout and forms designer. The editor has features such as syntax highlighting and autocompletion. Qt Creator uses the C++ compiler from the GNU Compiler Collection on Linux. On Windows it can use MinGW or MSVC with the default install and can also use Microsoft Console Debugger when compiled from source code. Clang is also supported.
Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS is a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and was released exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed. Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia. It was also prevalent in Japan by brands including Fujitsu, Sharp and Mitsubishi. As a pioneer that established the smartphone industry, it was the most popular smartphone OS on a worldwide average until the end of 2010, at a time when smartphones were in limited use, when it was overtaken by iOS and Android. It was notably less popular in North America.
Movial is a privately held software engineering company focused on Internet enabled devices in consumer electronics and telecommunications industries. The company’s services include device concept and user interface (UI) design, third-party application, service and platform integration, and consulting.
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.
Accounts & SSO, accounts-sso, or lately gSSO is a single sign-on framework for computers.
The Qt Project is an open collaboration effort to coordinate the development of the Qt software framework. Initially founded by Nokia in 2011, the project is now led by The Qt Company.
KDE Frameworks is a collection of libraries and software frameworks readily available to any Qt-based software stacks or applications on multiple operating systems. Featuring frequently needed functionality solutions like hardware integration, file format support, additional graphical control elements, plotting functions, and spell checking, the collection serves as the technological foundation for KDE Plasma and KDE Gear. It is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
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.