This guest editorial by Jerry Epplin reviews and discusses the history of Trolltech's open source licensing of Qt, Qt/Embedded, and the Qt Palmtop Environment (QPE), and draws an interesting comparison with customary practices in “free market” economies. Epplin writes . . .

“Most Linux users are aware of Qt, the GUI framework on which the KDE desktop environment is based. In the Linux desktop application development world, Qt competes with Gtk+, which forms the basis for the Gnome desktop environment. Until recently developers were faced with a choice between the pure open-source licensing of Gtk+, which has what many consider to be a less elegant programming model; and the somewhat more proprietary licensing of Qt, which has a clean, intuitive, object-oriented API.”

“The proprietary Qt license complicated the licensing of KDE, which is distributed under the GPL and LGPL — no one was quite certain whether it was strictly legal to link it with the proprietary-licensed Qt. But recent licensing changes by Trolltech have removed the licensing issues, somewhat tipping the scales toward Qt — and, by extension, toward KDE in the desktop world.”

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