"The Norway-based company Trolltech is well known for their C++ and fully OOP Toolkit, Qt . Qt is the basis of KDE, but it is also a very important and powerful tool under Windows, MacOS/X and X11 developers. Qt 3.0 released less than a month ago, bringing some really impressive features , like the ability to build platform- and database independent database applications, greatly improved internationalisation and font handling etc. Harri Porten, TrollTech employee and also a KDE developer (mostly working on the javascript part on K
Konqueror) answers some of our questions.
1. How Trolltech chooses the parts of Qt that will be kept commercial and which parts will be open sourced?
Harri Porten: Apart from some SQL driver code depending on proprietary 3rd party libs Qt is open sourced as a whole on every open source OS. The only real difference between the Free and Commercial Editions are in fact the attached licensing conditions.
2. Please tell us about Qt/Embedded. How do you find the embedded systems market in comparison to the desktop computing one?
Harri Porten: As I see it, the embedded systems market is much more demanding in terms of product quality. Given that memory and cpu power are so precious on embedded devices, there is literally no space for sloppy code there. Consequently, buyers in this arena value Qt/Embedded's small memory footprint and resource efficiency very much."
