KDE developers are sticking to Qt

Announced at the beginning of this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC), the partnership between Microsoft and Nokia will see smart phones from the Finnish manufacturer running the Windows Phone 7 operating system; but this has apparently left users of KDE, the Unix and Linux desktop, feeling insecure. Reassurance has come in the form of a blog entry by Cornelius Schumacher, President of the KDE board of directors: he states that KDE development will continue on the basis of the C++ framework, Qt.

Users became concerned about the future of Qt because, with Nokia moving over to Windows Phone 7, this would leave Qt only being used for development for the Symbian platform. But Symbian will probably not last much longer, and by 2014 at the latest, the newer operating systems will play a greater role.

Since 1996, KDE has been developed using Qt, under both the LGPL and a commercial licence, because the developers considered it to be the best development framework; and according to Schumacher, they still do: Qt is a "strong cross-platform foundation for everything we do". He adds that Nokia has contributed to Qt's success by releasing it under the LGPL and by "giving the community greater influence through Open Governance".

He also noted that KDE is only just starting to take advantage of recent developments in Qt, such as Qt Quick, a toolset for development using Qt Declarative Markup Language (QML). Schumacher concluded by stating that "we believe Qt is the compelling framework for cross-platform software development".

See also:

• Nokia releases Qt SDK 1.1 Beta, a report from The H.

(ehe)