Digia recently acquired the full Qt business from Nokia,Juhapekka Niemi,director,Digia,Qt,talks to Electronics Weekly about how the mobile software business will develop and grow in a market where open source has growing popularity.

What is Qt and how does Digia fit in?

Juhapekka Niemi:Qt is a worldwide leading cross-platform application and user interface(UI)development framework used to develop compelling user experiences for desktop,mobile and embedded targets.

Over 450,000 developers working in more than 70 industries have chosen Qt as their strategic development framework because of its intuitive UI and backend logic capabilities,cross-platform code portability and full solution management,to name a few.

Aren't open source and commercial licensing total opposites?

Juhapekka Niemi:Commercial and open source software work in a symbiotic manner where both benefit from a large ecosystem of commercial and community developers as well as support from a large company.All work together to ultimately provide a full-performing and stable development framework.

The Qt application development framework is distributed under a commercial licence from Digia or under the terms of the GNU open source licensing through the Qt Project.

The licensing terms are quite different,and provide different value.A lot of companies do not want,or cannot,work through the limitations set by the open source licence agreement,or they feel they do not want to take additional risks and choose the commercial licence for peace of mind.

The open source licence,as the name says,is still a software licence and therefore any company using it must understand the terms and work according to them.

Companies looking for a strategic framework that enables them to develop risk free;distribute their product as they like while keeping their code proprietary;and have full R&D and support capabilities available to them from a company that makes significant investments into the future of the framework,choose commercial licensing.

It provides added value where specific modules,components and support platforms,for example,are developed based on customer requirements.These add-ons are validated and tested by Qt to ensure successful project deployments for the customer on a variety of targets.

Why do companies pay for software that is available for free?

Juhapekka Niemi:Even though there is no direct transaction when a user develops under the open source license,there are some costs that should be taken into account.For example,the open source licensing agreement is a fairly complex licence and anyone developing software under it should consult a well-versed software lawyer who understands its obligations.

Qt's commercial licensing offers a number of benefits that are not available through open source licensing.Firstly,the company gains more freedom when developing its Qt-based product.

For example,to be able to get the best performance or add protection from malicious software,static linking might be needed in the software.Secondly,there is no requirement to publish modifications to the Qt software or its libraries-this protects a company's investment.

One very important point to note when developing complex software is that there will inevitably be bugs and issues with architecture or performance.Qt's commercial licence provides access to updates and patch releases together with direct support from a team of the most experienced Qt users and developers.

These are just a few examples of things that the commercial licence offers that make our customers feel more confident about their project succeeding,and help them to save money.

What trends are you seeing in embedded product development?

Juhapekka Niemi:The coinciding mega trends that we see are the increasing demands for rich graphics in a variety of products in major industries;the extensive adoption of touch manipulation in many devices that used to be controlled with switches and buttons;and the dramatically rising requirement for web connectivity in previously standalone systems.

The combination of advanced chipsets with hardware acceleration is fuelling these trends and resulting in quantum leaps in the interface capabilities of embedded products.

Many products will be judged,not by the exterior design,but how the user interface looks and works.You don't need to look further than your pocket for a great example of this.

These trends together mean that the complexity of product creation is increasing rapidly.Development tools like Qt are becoming essential to ensure shipping of successful projects.

You recently announced integrations with the leading RTOS vendors,why is that important?

Juhapekka Niemi:The above mentioned mega trends in the embedded sector also affect developers of products that rely on real-time operating systems to guarantee performance,safety or security.

This means that the RTOSes need to be integrated with the best possible tools to expedite the creation of rich GUIs.We see evidence of this every day from customer demand in industries such as automotive,medical,and aerospace.

In response to this we have introduced support for INTEGRITY,QNX and VxWorks.

What excites you about the future of embedded design?

Juhapekka Niemi:The embedded market offers tremendous business opportunities not only because of the market size and vast industries adopting these technologies,but also because these trends mean that the embedded products will become better and more user friendly with a large majority looking to adopt rich,touch-enabled GUIs.