Editing Qt (software) (section)

=== Early developments ===
In the summer of 1990, Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng (the original developers of Qt and the CEO and President, respectively, of [[Trolltech]]) were working together on a database application for ultrasound images written in C++ and running on [[Classic Mac OS|Mac OS]], [[Unix]], and [[Microsoft Windows]].<ref name="oreilly-qt"/><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.qt.io/qt20/|title=Qt - Qt20|work=Qt}}</ref> They began development of "Qt" in 1991, three years before the company was incorporated as Quasar Technologies, then changed the name to Troll Tech and then to Trolltech.<ref name="oreilly-qt" />

The toolkit was called Qt because the letter [[Q]] looked appealing in Haavard's [[Emacs]] typeface, and "t" was inspired by [[X Toolkit Intrinsics|Xt]], the X toolkit.<ref name="oreilly-qt">{{cite book|title=C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 |last1=Blanchette |first1=Jasmin |last2=Summerfield |first2=Mark |publisher=[[Prentice-Hall]] |chapter=A Brief History of Qt |pages=xv–xvii |edition=1st |date=June 2006 |chapter-url=http://my.safaribooksonline.com/0131872494/pref04 |access-date=5 August 2013|archive-date=23 September 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190923193951/https://my.safaribooksonline.com/0131872494/pref04}}</ref>

The first two versions of Qt had only two flavors: Qt/X11 for Unix and Qt/Windows for Windows.

On 20 May 1995 Trolltech publicly released Qt 0.90 for X11/Linux with the [[source code]] under the ''Qt Free Edition License''.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=qt1.git&a=blob&h=2b98366d82a95f66988a7206290120e8c698ea40&f=LICENSE&o=plain |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161014010101/https://quickgit.kde.org/?p%3Dqt1.git%26a%3Dblob%26h%3D2b98366d82a95f66988a7206290120e8c698ea40%26f%3DLICENSE%26o%3Dplain|title=Qt Free Edition License |year=1992|publisher=Trolltech|access-date=14 October 2016|url-status=dead|archive-date=14 October 2016}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://blog.qt.io/blog/2015/05/20/happy-20th-anniversary-qt/|title=Happy 20th Anniversary Qt! |work=Qt Blog}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://sdtimes.com/qt-framework-celebrates-its-20th-anniversary/|title=Qt framework celebrates its 20th anniversary|work=SD Times|date=21 May 2015}}</ref> This license was viewed as not compliant with the free software definition by [[Free Software Foundation]] because, while the source was available, it did not allow the redistribution of modified versions. Trolltech used this license until version 1.45. Controversy erupted around 1998 when it became clear that the [[K Desktop Environment 1|K Desktop Environment]] was going to become one of the leading desktop environments for Linux. As it was based on Qt, many people in the [[free software movement]] worried that an essential piece of one of their major operating systems would be proprietary.

The Windows platform was available only under a proprietary license, which meant free/open source applications written in Qt for X11 could not be ported to Windows without purchasing the proprietary edition.