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It's about time. The fact that Qt never had any licensing options other than GPL (and QPL at one time), and an insanely expensive commercial license (over $6,000 per developer for a cross platform license) is the main reason I was never able to take Qt seriously as a toolkit worth my time to learn. After all, no individual developer can afford that much money to buy their own personal license, and often GPL is not an option because you rely on other libraries that are not GPL compatible. Now that will change. and Qt will be a viable option for me.

I agree with you, but at least it's here now which is *GREAT* news...! :)))

They at last added the LGPL option after 12 years?, If was in that time Linux GUI could be right now awesome and the only one, In that time I would drooped MFC, WIN32 and not enter with .Net. and use Qt. But right now I think is little late. There is already RIA, Web, JavaFX, Silverlight, Virtual Machines etc etc, for what we still need a desktop c++ toolkit? Ah and Linux a lot of standard software runs with GTK behind.

It is awesome news at last they did it but I think is to late, nobody cares.

I agree with you too, though I don't think it's "too late". There are TONS of projects that will benefit from this, e.g. Safari and Chrome plus a gazillion others. In many ways this rips the entire existence away from GTK and Gnome...
Gnome was started because Qt "wasn't open enough"...
And GTK is way inferior to Qt, some will claim the same is true for Gnome...
This is great news for FOSS and BAD news for MSFT... ;)

"They at last added the LGPL option after 12 years?"

The answer is in this video: http://www.qtsoftware.com/about/licensing

Im agree so well lets see how it develops, I hope now the Linux GUI people understand that KDE and Qt are the way to go, I always liked KDE and I will start to play with qtHaskell more and PyQt.

Ah and there is also QtJambi the Java version for Qt. Java could be a great tool for KDE and Qt development.

time to have another look at the QtJambi stuff, could be useful.

So does this mean we'll get a Qt backed SWT/Eclipse? In the past I know there was a Qt backend for SWT but because Qt was GPL they (IBM) couldn't release it for free. Now they should be able to release that code. On the same note, why would a person bother writing to the SWT API anymore now that you can just write to Qt and get a high-quality (and more performant) cross-platform UI?

-Bryan

Great questions, I personally think this would probably make the number of Qt users increase by *several orders of magnitudes*...
Qt is a *VERY* good GUI library, and I think this has effectively *eliminated* the competition out there...
But I might be wrong ...

Does this mean we'll (finally) get a version of Eclipse with QT widgets?

I have no idea, but an Earthquake like this is *bound* to mean something for about every single piece of technology out here. So I would be surprised if it doesn't also means something somehow for also Eclipse...!

Well, the only problem is that Qt is a pretty ugly looking toolkit on Linux...their font rendering does not seem to be as smooth as GTK+ and their look and feel engines are horrible, the GTK+ ones are much nicer.

Even if the API is better, the L&F of Qt is pretty subpar IMHO. Never liked the KDE L&F, even though they make some killer apps, like Amarok.

Well now with their new LGPL move they're also opening up SVN access and are much more interested in getting help on the code. So I guess that the code will move forward much faster too and give features you want like "better fonts" and such. So I think this problem too will be fixed ... ;)