KDE: Rely on Qt, protect Qt's freedom, contribute to it

[wh0rd]

With the recent strategy changes within Nokia—the largest contributor to Qt, there is uncertainty about the future of Qt that concerns KDE. This is the position of the KDE community regarding the future of Qt:

• KDE will continue to rely on Qt and cooperate with the Qt copyright owners and contributors.

• Using the strong ties between both communities and existing formal agreements, KDE will protect the freedom of Qt and KDE where necessary.

• Continuing the KDE Frameworks 5 development process that has already begun, KDE will help improve Qt and contribute to it.

kde.org

[GreyGeek]

http://www.kde.org/community/whatisk...foundation.php

The Foundation has a license agreement with Nokia. This agreement ensures that the Qt will continue to be available under both the LGPL 2.1 and the GPL 3. Should Nokia discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under these licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreement stays valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy.

The board of the Foundation consists of two members from Nokia and two members from KDE e.V. Decisions of the Foundation are taken by vote of the board members. In case of a tie the votes of the KDE representatives decide.
...
In October 2011, Nokia launched the Qt Project, allowing both companies and individuals to contribute to the development of Qt under open governance terms. To ensure the fairness of the contribution terms to individual developers, two lawyers were contracted by the KDE Free Qt Foundation. Nokia took their feedback into account and made is thus possible for the KDE Free Qt Foundation to support both the launch of the Qt Project and the wording improvements in the Qt Contribution License Agreement 1.1: “We fully support the work being done with the Qt Project. An openly governed Qt is in the best interests of all Qt developers. The Open Governance structure of the Qt Project empowers developers to influence the direction and the pace of Qt development. Stakeholders in the future of Qt, such as KDE, can now contribute according to their own priorities and take ownership over areas of Qt that are of particular importance to them.” (Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer and Martin Konold, the two board members from KDE)

The KDE e.V. appointed as board members of the KDE Free Qt Foundation the following people:

• Martin Konold
• Olaf Schmidt

The current voting members from Nokia are:

• Lars Knoll
• Matthias Ettrich

Matthias Ettrich:

He currently resides in Berlin, Germany. He works for Nokia on the Qt graphical widget toolkit and the Qt Creator IDE.
Free software projects

Ettrich founded and furthered the LyX project in 1995, initially conceived as a university term project. LyX is a graphical frontend to LaTeX.


Since LyX's main target platform was Linux, he started to explore different ways to improve the graphical user interface, which ultimately led him to the KDE project. Ettrich founded KDE in 1996, when he proposed on Usenet a "consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment" [sic] for Unix-like systems using Qt as its widget toolkit.


On 6 Nov 2009, Ettrich was decorated with the Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to Free Software.

Lars Knoll:

A Short Intro

• Located in: Oslo, Norway
• Occupation: Studied physics, now working as software developer for Trolltech.
• Claim to Fame: Konqueror's HTML engine, Qt developer
• Fav. KDE applications: Konqueror and KMail

[wh0rd]

Awesome! Looks like the future of Qt is in good hands. Thanks for posting the background info.