![](https://csdnimg.cn/release/download_crawler_static/88418012/bg12.jpg)
available under two licenses from day one: A commercial license was required for commercial
development, and a free software edition was available for open source development. The
Metis contract kept Trolltech afloat, while for ten long months no one bought a commercial Qt
license.
In March 1996, the European Space Agency became the second Qt customer, with a purchase
of ten commercial licenses. With unwavering faith, Eirik and Haavard hired another developer.
Qt 0.97 was released at the end of May, and on September 24, 1996, Qt 1.0 came out. By the
end of the year, Qt had reached version 1.1; eight customers, each in a different country, had
bought 18 licenses between them. This year also saw the founding of the KDE project, led by
Matthias Ettrich.
Qt 1.2 was released in April 1997. Matthias Ettrich's decision to use Qt to build KDE helped Qt
become the de facto standard for C++ GUI development on Linux. Qt 1.3 was released in
September 1997.
Matthias joined Trolltech in 1998, and the last major Qt 1 release, 1.40, was made in
September of that year. Qt 2.0 was released in June 1999. Qt 2 had a new open source
license, the Q Public License (QPL), which complied with the Open Source Definition. In
August 1999, Qt won the LinuxWorld award for best library/tool. Around this time, Trolltech
Pty Ltd (Australia) was established.
Trolltech released Qt/Embedded Linux in 2000. It was designed to run on embedded Linux
devices and provided its own window system as a lightweight replacement for X11. Both
Qt/X11 and Qt/Embedded Linux were now offered under the widely used GNU General Public
License (GPL) as well as under commercial licenses. By the end of 2000, Trolltech had
established Trolltech Inc. (USA) and had released the first version of Qtopia, an application
platform for mobile phones and PDAs. Qt/Embedded Linux won the LinuxWorld "Best
Embedded Linux Solution" award in both 2001 and 2002, and Qtopia Phone achieved the
same distinction in 2004.
Qt 3.0 was released in 2001. Qt was now available on Windows, Mac OS X, Unix, and Linux
(desktop and embedded). Qt 3 provided 42 new classes and its code exceeded 500000 lines.
Qt 3 was a major step forward from Qt 2, including considerably improved locale and Unicode
support, a completely new text viewing and editing widget, and a Perl-like regular expression
class. Qt 3 won the Software Development Times "Jolt Productivity Award" in 2002.
In the summer of 2005, Qt 4.0 was released. With about 500 classes and more than 9000
functions, Qt 4 is larger and richer than any previous version, and it has been split into
several libraries so that developers only need to link against the parts of Qt that they need.
Qt 4 is a huge advance on previous versions with improvements that include a completely
new set of efficient and easy-to-use template containers, advanced model/view functionality,
a fast and flexible 2D painting framework, and powerful Unicode text viewing and editing
classes, not to mention thousands of smaller enhancements across the complete range of Qt
classes. Qt 4's feature set is now so broad that it has taken Qt beyond being a GUI toolkit and
made it into a full-blown application development framework. Qt 4 is also the first Qt edition