Today Nokia announced the start of the open governance model for Qt, known as the Qt Project. The Qt Project allows both companies and individuals to contribute to the development of Qt. KDE supports this move and is excited about the possibilities it brings. We have been waiting for opportunities to take a more active role in Qt's future for a long time and open governance will make this easier.

Knut's got talent

Over the last few weeks a phenomenon has been sweeping the cultural headlines of Norway. Qt Community Manager and friend of KDE Knut Yrvin has been amazing the judges of Norske Talenter (Norway's Got Talent) with his robotic moves (YouTube video).

Tonight is the final and Knut has made it to the last few contestants. The streets of Oslo will be silent as everyone will be eagerly watching the Norwegian Ant and Dec introduce the acts. Will Knut triumph or will the judges buzz him out? KDE will be backing him all the way.

Update: unfortunately he failed to make first place, the Norwegian Simon Cowell must have just as poor judgement as the original. Knut will always be a winner with KDE and we look forward to a repeat performance at Akademy. Coverage on YouTube.

Last week, Munich saw the 2009 Edition of the Qt Developer Days. Qt Developer Days is a Qt-focused software conference which is held yearly in Europe and the U.S. The American edition will be held at the start of November in San Francisco. 700 attendants and more than 70 Trolls made this edition the biggest Developer Days to date. Qt Development Frameworks had invited a group of KDE developers to the conference, more well-known heads from the KDE world were sent by their respective employers. The days brought training sessions around Qt and many interesting presentations ranging from higher level topics such as the future roadmap for Qt to topics related to Qt programming with techniques and technologies such as the Model/View Framework, QGraphicsView, WebKit, multithreading and many more. Read on for a more detailed report of what has been revealed and talked about during the three-day conference in Munich's Hilton Park hotel.

Today, we at Qt Software have opened our repositories to the public. Any developer can now help guide and shape the future development of Qt by contributions of code, translations, examples and other material to Qt and Qt-related projects. We have also published our roadmap and released Qt Jambi under the LGPL. Read on for details.

Earlier today, Qt Software released updates to Qt and Qt Creator. Both releases are available for download from http://qtsoftware.com/downloads -- either stand-alone or as part of a new build of the Qt SDK.

Qt 4.5.1 includes bugfixes and optimizations made since the release of Qt 4.5.0.

Qt Creator 1.1 incorporates a good deal of user feedback gathered since the 1.0 release, and provides a broad collection of improvements and additions.

Today, the Qt Marketing Team has launched a new website to engage the community in a different way: QtOverload.com. This site is dedicated to unusual Qt development and will mirror the diversity of the ecosystem surrounding Qt.

Qt Software directly asks for submissions by their readers and hopes for a broad spectrum of contributions ranging from mockups to actual applications that make use of Qt technology.

Qt Software has made Qt 4.5 and the Qt Creator 1.0 IDE available for download. For the first time, Qt SDK is available, a convenient bundle of the two. Qt Software will be opening up their development process by making it easier for people to contribute patches and add-ons in the forthcoming weeks. Both Qt and Creator now come with the an LGPL licensing option along with the current GPL and commercial licenses.

Qt 4.5 brings many new features such as a new pluggable graphics system, ODF support and an updated WebKit component which features HTML 5, Netscape-Plugin (e.g. Flash) support and the SquirrelFish JavaScript engine. Find out more in the Qt release blog, the Qt Creator release blog and feel free to join the new #qt-labs IRC channel on Freenode.

Nokia has announced that starting with version 4.5, Qt will be available under the LGPL 2.1. From the announcement,

The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework.

This exciting change, made with consultation of the
KDE Free Qt Foundation, should encourage KDE and Qt use among commercial and proprietary developers and makes the philosophy of "Qt Everywhere" complete.

Today is the day of beta releases: Qt Software has released betas of Qt 4.5 and Qt Creator — two Qt releases just in time for the holidays!

News emerged recently that Qt Software (formerly Trolltech) were working on their first IDE
for Qt, code named Project Greenhouse. Today saw the release of the
first technical preview under the name Qt Creator. The initial
release is binary only, and under the terms of the Qt preview license,
but the final release will be released with source code under a GPL
compatible license. The initial release is available for Linux, Mac OS
X and MS Windows. Read on for a users review.