Qt History

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"In the summer of 1990 Haavard [Nord] and Eirik [Chambe-Eng] were working together on a C++ database application for ultrasound images. The system needed to be able to run with a GUI on Unix, Macintosh, and Windows. One day that summer, Haavard and Eirik went outside to enjoy the sunshine, and as they sat on a park bench, Haavard said, "We need an object-oriented display system." The resulting discussion laid the intellectual foundation for the object-oriented cross-platform GUI framework they would soon go on to build."

Timeline

1990 Qt conceived by Haarvard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng on a park bench in Trondheim, Norway.

1995 Troll Tech 1st public release on 20 May. Qt 0.90 for X11/Linux. Commercial & open source (FreeQt license)

1996 Customer no. 1: European Space Agency. Qt 1.0, full X11 support free for free software development plus Windows. KDE project established with Qt as its underlying library.

1998 KDE Free Qt Foundation: guarantees Qt availability for free software development

1999 Qt 2.0 - Qt/X11 open source with QPL (Q Public license)

2000 New Qt windowing system, Qt/Embedded, a.k.a. QWS & Qtopia Core. Both Qt/X11 & Qt/Embedded under GPL + commercial licenses. GPL v2 with Qt 2.2

2001 Qt 3.0 - "Multiple database environments, multiple languages, multiple monitors" with Mac OS X support & a new Qt Designer GUI builder

2005 Qt 4.0. Total makeover (a.k.a. compatibility break) under commercial & GPL 2.0 (or later) for all platforms even Windows (Qt 4 dance video published)

2006 Trolltech IPO. Greenphone developer smartphone. Qtopia in millions of devices worldwide from Sharp to Motorola.

2008 Nokia acquires Trolltech, "Qt Software at Nokia"

2009 Qt Creator launched and Qt 4.5 brought LGPL v2.1

2010 Qt Quick launched, WebKit integration & Symbian support in Qt 4.7

2011 Digia acquires Qt commercial licensing business. Qt Project. Nokia N9 - Nokia MeeGo "Harmattan" smartphone. Nokia changes smartphone platform strategy

2012 Digia acquires all right to Qt, "Digia, Qt". Qt 5.0 major overhaul, new modularized codebase, consolidation of QPA (Qt Platform Abstraction), Qt Quick 2, and more support for mobile (WinRT).

2013 Boot to Qt pre-built software stack & Qt WebEngine

2014 "Digia, Qt" becomes its own entity "The Qt Company", subsidiary of Digia

2015 20th anniversary of Qt's 1st public release. One Qt Site Unification completed. 800K+ Qt developers worldwide

See Also

• Release history