Nokia will make Qt available under GNU’s LGPL. Qt is a cross-platform toolkit, which has powered various applications on the desktop and mobile. The LGPL will encourage its adoption especially in the mobile world. I also think that Nokia itself will do many more things with it for its own purpose.
Qt is highly portable across multiple platforms, but there aren’t many applications which exhibit that. Does Qt have many users which use multiple platforms? In my opinion, other than KDE, Qt needs to exhibit more, smaller applications that end users can make popular. I look forward to using more cross-platform tools powered by Qt. Maybe Google Chrome could have used Qt and be ready for multiple platforms.
January 29th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Google Chrome using Qt would be cool. VirtualBox uses it for the GUI now I think. I know there are other apps that use it but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. I’m sure the change in license will help promote more use though, which I think will be a good think. I think there’s been mention of losing GTK and having GNOME adopt Qt, but I’m doubtful that would happen.
January 29th, 2009 at 11:30 am
There are some apps using Qt, like the Linux Skype or Eric (Python IDE), and recently Arora webkit browser. I also think that QtWebKit does a much better job than the WebKitGtk+, but there aren’t many browsers adopting it.
However, the fact that we cannot remember any of the Qt apps perhaps means that they are not our primary apps. Also, I am not sure if the users are aware of Qt applications that work on all platforms.
February 16th, 2009 at 9:44 am
[...] Google Chrome have decided to go with Gtk+ for the Linux version. However you still see mentions of Qt in the developers mailing list. I too had wondered the same after Qt went LGPL. [...]