Qt Project: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:03, 5 October 2016

Revision as of 02:13, 14 October 2016

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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.<ref name="oreilly-qt">{{cite web|url=http://safari.oreilly.com/0131872494/pref04|title=A Brief History of Qt|accessdate=20 December 2007}}</ref>

Until version 1.45, source code for Qt was released under the FreeQt''Qt licenseFree Edition License''.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=qt1.git&a=blob&h=2b98366d82a95f66988a7206290120e8c698ea40&f=LICENSE&o=plain|title=Qt Free Edition License|year=1992|publisher=Trolltech|accessdate=14 October 2016|archivedate=14 October 2016}}</ref> 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 erupted around 1998 when it became clear that [[KDE|KDE’s]] [[K Desktop Environment 1|K Desktop Environment]] was going to become one of the leading [[desktop environment]]s 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.