Trolltech
More info
- Creator
- Haavard Nord, Eirik Chambe-Eng
- Released
- 1994–2008
- Type
- Software company
- Successor
- Qt Software (Nokia)
The Norwegian company that wrote Qt, sold it under a dual licence, and showed that open source and paying customers can share one codebase.
Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng began sketching a cross-platform C++ GUI framework in 1990 and founded Trolltech in Oslo in 1994. Qt became the foundation of KDE, which led to a long licensing fight: Qt was not free software, and several Linux distributions refused to ship a desktop built on it. Trolltech answered with its own QPL licence in 1998 and released Qt for X11 under the GPL in 2000.
The model — GPL if you share your code, a commercial licence if you don't — paid the bills. The Qtopia mobile platform opened a path into phones, and in 2008 Nokia bought Trolltech for around $150 million. Nokia sold the commercial Qt business to Finland's Digia in 2012.