Now this is interesting. I’ve mentioned a few times in my blog that the world would be a different place if Qt was given a free commercial friendly license, like LGPL. Of course when Trolltech was an independent company, that would have killed all their revenue. But now that they’re owned by Nokia, I guess the time has come for them to make the change.

And I think this will open people’s eyes to Qt. It’s certainly a very rich framework giving pretty much everything you need to make a truly cross platform application, i.e. #ifdef free. And it’s used in some very popular applications like Skype, Google Earth, and the VirtualBox manager. And, of course, it’s the foundation of the Linux KDE desktop environment, which has it’s devoted fans.

And again, being LGPL, I’d expect to see it used by more commercial applications. Heck, it will now pass my policy and I’ll be able to include it in Wascana, and the SWT developers will also be allowed by their lawyers to write the port against it. Who knows…

But as I scout the horizon of desktop and mobile apps, I wonder if the apparent momentum away from C/C++ has become too great for this to make a significant splash, or will it just be a ripple. Maybe my head is too deep in WebKit these days and my view is getting tainted, but the web is slowly taking over. I guess the one thing Qt has going for it is a decent WebKit integration so maybe they can get the best of both worlds. Either way, it’s definitely time for me to take a deeper look at Qt (and it’s CDT integration, of course ;)).