So Nokia have made a change to the licensing model of its QT framework.

The QT framework is a cross-platform C/C++ GUI framework developed by a Norwegian company name Trolltech which Nokia acquired last year. Anyone who has been doing cross-platform C++ applications with a GUI will have come across this framework and / or used it at some point.

However, the previous licensing model was very restrictive.

The only platform you could freely develop for was Linux – if you wanted to use QT for Windows, Mac or any other QT supported platform, you had to purchase a (not so insignificantly priced) license for each platform.
This model really locked out independent developers and small development companies as the cost was simply too great. This will surely have hampered adoption of a quite easy to use and polished framework.

And this is where Nokia’s move to the LGPL (GNU’s Lesser General Public License), an open source license, should really impact on the adoption and usage of the framework (and of course extra development!).

Personally I use and also like to contribute to the superb wxWidgets open source cross-platform GUI framework. It has great platform support, is well written, has a large community behind it, uses native controls etc etc – the list can go on.
However, QT also has many benefits too. I can imagine there will be occasions when QT would be a preferred choice, for example on embedded devices.

I certainly welcome this move and am looking forward to using QT more.