Qt embraces LGPL

 January 20, 2009

Last week, Sebastian Nyström (Vice President of Qt Software) announced that Qt would have one additional license from the next release: the LGPL.

This is a huge change from the previous Qt licensing policy and a good step in the path that Qt started many years ago.

We shall not forget that until 2000, Qt was released in a double Commercial/QPL license, and while the QPL name is Qt Public License, it was not considered Free Software by the Free Software Foundation. In 2000, they added the GPL license to the mix, which solved all issues for the open-source community but still forced the non-open-source customer to buy from Qt Software.

Last week’s change changes everything. In fact, from the next release, even the non-open-source developers will be able to leverage Qt thanks to the additional freedom guaranteed by the LGPL license. This makes sense, considering that Qt Software is owned by Nokia, which is probably more interested in the adoption of Qt than its monetization.

Even though the change does not directly impact me, I see it as very positive since it will bring many more people and applications to Qt. Therefore, I expect the Qt Community to grow even faster than it is growing today.