 which then is named TrollTec. And in 1995, they released the first version of Qt, Qt 0.9. And it looks like this, beautiful thing. You know this example from the documentation. I think it probably is still there somewhere. So this is 1995, and that's the story of Qt. And one of the really innovative things Irak and Hova did is decided on a dual licensing business model. So they had the Qt profession, which was their commercial offering for all platforms and all projects, including proprietary. So that's where they made money from. And innovative thing they did is they decided on releasing a Qt free edition as well under a free edition license for software projects which were free software. So free projects using free software. On X11 got this edition for free. The other part of the story we have to tell is the story of KDE. So one year later in 1996, PCs are still a thing. Windows has actually grown, is there. Unix has something called the common desktop environment, CDE, quite an enterprisey thing. And Linux is also coming along. Kernel 2.0 was just released and there are a number of Linux distributions. So the big ones, Debian, Red, Tetsuza, they are already around at the time and they are starting to becoming more and more successful. But if you look at the state of the graphical use on Linux, it's still quite sad. This is how on Linux it looked like. Not very convenient, not very consistent, quite difficult to, and certainly not made for ordinary people but for us who were using their command line tools in this window manager. So this situation obviously was something with a change. And in 1996, in October, Matthias Aetrich, a German student, was doing this. And he asked for programmers who wanted to join a project to create an actual user interface, a graphical user interface for users which was for normal people, not only the developers. And in his first email, he had actually two firm decisions. One was the stuff will be distributed under the terms of the GPL. So this was the start of a free software project. This was meant to be to use the power of the many people who are around. And the other decision is that this should be based on Qt, because he saw Qt as a very strong technical foundation to actually implement this somewhat cleaner desktop, how he calls it. And he also recognized TroilTech's business model and said, yeah, this kind of marketing, free source code for free software, that's something what I like. And this was actually the base which actually made it possible to develop KDE on Qt. So he asked for 20, 30 programmers to join and that happened. And in 1997, there was the first KDE presentation at the Linux Congress in Würzburg. That was an actually quite high profile event back then. So quite a number of prominent people joined there. Ted So was there. Eric Raymond was there. Der Konl was there. John Meadow-Kahl, they all talked about Linux, all kinds of things, free software and also Qt had a strong presence. So Howard was there talking about Qt. Kalle Dahlheimer, who was one of the first people joining Matthias Kohl and one of the core developers back then, he had to talk about programming on Linux. And Matthias himself, he talked about KDE and showed the first screenshot of KDE at the stage. So this is a screenshot of the original proceedings of the Congress showing KDE a pre-release, the current state back then. And this already looks quite promising. That was a huge success. So the story goes that there was another project, desktop project, which had a talk planned for after the KDE presentation and after they had seen what KDE presented there, they canceled the talk and left the conference. So KDE had quite an impact there. The proceedings what Matthias wrote there, so sorry, this is in German, but that's original. And he basically said three things then, this section. So the first one is Qt is the only possible solution from a technical point of view to actually be able to implement that. So they checked different things and all these different widgets around there, lots of different things, but not very well-developed and quite different, so he saw the chance to some unification there using Qt as the technical point of view. And he also hinted at a problem KDE had and that was Qt's license. So critics said Qt is not free. And what interesting is to see how Matthias framed it. So he put a sentence there, tongue in cheek. Yeah, we created a mailing list for discussing Qt license. So the people who are doing the actual work are not disturbed by these discussions. But it was a big discussion and it followed for a couple of time after that. And the big question there was, how free is free? So is Qt actually free software or not? And a lot of quite influential people from the FSL, from Reddit, from the game team, they argued that the Qt free edition license doesn't fulfill the requirements of free software. So it wasn't the GPL, but it was a homegrown license. And it had some conditions in there which were not compatible with what the GPL was doing. So people argued Qt is not free enough. The intention, of course, was to make it as free as it's needed for free software. But this was not accepted by everybody. And the other big question was, what happens if Troutech stops developing Qt? What happens if the toolkit is discontinued? If the company goes away, what happens with that? And the license didn't really allow changing it and further developing it. So this was one of the open questions the community had to answer and which led to quite a debate. And there was another threat. Kalle Dalheimer said that you have to understand that in this time it was actually common that companies would buy other companies just to shut down projects. And one of the fears there was that Microsoft would come and actually shut down Qt in some way. So Microsoft was in a situation back then when it was really actively fighting Linux. So this was quite real. And you can see it, this is a famous advertisement from a German computer magazine where Microsoft actually said, yeah, if you use Linux, you will get mutations. You don't have it under control. Then later in 1997, there was a pivotal meeting in the history of KDE. KDE won the developer meeting in Ansberg. This was the first time all the KDE developers got together. Ansberg is a small German town. There is a manufacturer of wafer makers actually who was using Linux. They had some Linux fans and they set up some exterminers for the KDE developers to work on. They invited them to Ansberg. So they had the meeting there. And it came at a pretty delicate time because two weeks before this meeting Gnome was founded as an answer or a reaction to the license question. And so there was competition out there and Trojtek sent Eric and aunt to Germany to join the meeting and to work together with the KDE people and obviously also to discuss the question of the license. And you have to realize that at that time, Trojtek was just six employees and KDE had something like 200 developers working in KDE. So the strategy of Qt worked. So they got this huge community adoption. They got this many people who actually use Qt. And on the other hand, it also worked for KDE. They had a strong toolkit in Qt. So they had the discussions about how do they deal with the license question and Trojtek made a pretty bold offer there. So they said, okay, we want to have a contract between the community and the company which makes sure that Qt stays free forever. So the KDE people were a bit shocked by that. They didn't expect that much from that. But in the end, of course, that was a pretty good solution and they went ahead with that. And then later in 1998, beginning of 1998, the statement of intent was signed by the KDE side, Kaleh Matias, and the Qt side with Irika Tobias. And they laid down the two main things there which the agreement should have. And the one was to have this foundation which makes sure that the Qt free edition is available and updated for free software development. And the second part that if this is not happening, if the company is stopping the Qt free edition, that it shall be released under the BSD license which would allow a lot more liberal things to do with the toolkit to actually keep up things. And we'll talk about that later. So this was the agreement they had and then Trojtek hired prestigious Norwegian lawyer and had to explain to them that they actually wanted to give away something for free and to want to make sure that the company doesn't have a chance to change that. It was an interesting challenge but once the lawyer understood that, they were ready to go and they wrote the actual agreement. So how does it work? The thing is that at this time, there wasn't a legal entity on behalf of KDE. So the first thing which was happening was that KDE EV was founded. This happened at the end of 1997. And Trojtek EV created together this foundation which is called the KDE FreeQ Foundation. The reason to do that in a separate foundation was that in the case Trojtek would go bankrupt, then it would get hard to get access to the assets of Trojtek. And of course, the software queue with the licenses would be an asset. So they said, okay, we put that into an independent foundation so that is something which can't be taken away. And the license agreement which Trojtek gives to the KDE FreeQ Foundation gives the guarantee that the KDE FreeQ Foundation can then actually do what is necessary to keep QT free. And the foundation is actually a very small thing. It only consists of two representatives of both sides. And they built the board of the foundation which takes to the decision. And there's a twist there because KDE has a majority in case of ties. So if there is a two to two voting then KDE decides about the result which gives KDE the leverage to actually keep the license free of QT in case something happens. And the primary tool to do that is that the license agreement says if no major updates of QT, of the QT free edition happen in five months then the foundation can release the QT free edition under the BSD license. And the consequences of that are it protects QT against bankruptcy takeover and change of plans because under the BSD license you actually have the permission to use it for all kinds of projects open source as well as proprietary. So that's a very liberal license. And it also allows to build again a new company with a similar dual licensing business model. That's something which you can do with the BSD license you can incorporate into proprietary offerings but this wouldn't be possible with the GPF. So then in 1998, the agreement finally is signed in June. There's an announcement and this has a nice statement in it. It says we believe the founding of the KDE free QT foundation to be an unprecedented groundbreaking step ushering in a new era of software development allowing the KDE project, the free software community all free software developers as well as commercial software developers to prosper in a mutually supportive fashion. Quite about statement I think it reflects the mindset of KDE and QT at that time but it's actually quite powerful and it has carried on the project and the foundation over the years. This is the actual agreement which was signed three pages and then a few weeks later KDE 1.0 was released based on Qt 1.0.2 and it looked like this. This is still not the beautiful desktop it's a great start and the project is actually a lot of momentum and it evolved and over the time also the license of Qt evolved. Project added the QPL after some time which then was actually accepted as an open source license. Later they changed it to the GPL and this was the point in time which actually ended all the discussions about if Qt is free software or not. KDE also evolved had major updates and the agreement in 2004 was updated as well to reflect the chain licensing also in the releases of Qt and how KDE used it. 2005 also under the GPL in Qt 4 but at that time it wasn't covered by the agreement yet. One of the challenges there with the agreement is that the question what is the Qt free addition actually is the crucial question of the whole agreement. So what actually means this continued what means major update? What is part of Qt? What do you do with deprecated modules and stuff like that? Also what platforms are covered by the agreement at the writing of the agreement for example embedded platforms weren't around so nobody thought about that. What about Windows? What about mobile phones and stuff like that? Also what licenses are acceptable? What happens with the GPL version 3 which was relevant at some point? So this is the crucial thing which always needed some discussion and debate and continues working on the agreement to adapt it to the current state. And then with the discussions which were happening in the KDE FreeQ Foundation this actually was quite helpful to create this balance to balance the interest between the community and the company. The foundation gave this platform to actually have these discussions. Then in 2008, there was an email to KDEV by the TrialTech management. And it said, yeah, TrialTech is acquired by Nokia. So this was the moment where the agreement was put to test. This was what the agreement was designed for. And people were actually interested in what was happening there. We are quite aware that this would be an interesting situation but in this case Nokia actually went with that in a very responsive way. So they contacted us very early. KDE was at the table. We had meetings with the Nokia management in Frankfurt. That wasn't fun with where the Nokia managers visited us in our then very small office with half an employee shared with the Wikimedia Foundation. And we had about Qt and KDE there. And then we had the invitation back to the Nokia headquarters in Helsinki which was of course quite a contrast. But the great thing was we discussed these things on iLevel because it was clear that the agreement was in place and it was still in place and that we would have to talk about how we do the best with that for the communities. Nokia also added the LGPL. There was a third agreement to reflect the changes. And Qt 5 then was developed under open governance when Nokia opened Qt to actually contributions of more people. They were quite ambitious. Sebastian Neustrom, who was running the Qt part of Nokia at that time. He is set in the keynote on the Qt F days in 2009 that they wanted to increase the reach of Qt 10 fold. And that's something clearly you can't do without the community outreach. So over the years, more evolution. Nokia of course changed plans. That's a different story. Digia acquired Qt, Qt 5 was released. There was a fourth agreement reflecting the changes then the Qt company was formed and eventually went public. Another agreement reflected the changes there. That's basically the state where we are today. We have this agreement in place. We are in constructive discussions with the Qt company and it still is valid. There's one twist in the story, which is interesting. The agreement also was built to prevent selling Qt to Microsoft. Microsoft actually acquired most part of Nokia in 2013. And this is where Qt already was in the end of Digia. So also there the agreement worked. What's the end of the story? Well, we can say mission accomplished, Qt stayed free. Qt stayed free across multiple acquisitions. And that's what the agreement was meant to do. So this worked. But of course, this is not the end of the story because Qt are still there and KDE are still there and they have a hopeful, glory for the future. So the agreement will still be there and serve this purpose. But there are a couple of things which can be learned from it. And one is that this was really a solid thing. It served for more than 20 years. Qt stayed free and KDE and Qt both had quite good success and impact. So this certainly was a good foundation. And it worked in two ways. One was that the license guaranteed the present freedom. So once you had the code under the GPL of Qt and KDE, of course you could do whatever you want with that under the conditions of the license, but only with the code you already had. And the foundation guaranteed also something about the future freedom. So that the code would be developed in an open and free way in the future as well. And through the foundation you had this mechanism to foster a dialogue and this balancing between community and commercial interests. So quite a strong set up which actually keeps things free. One question is sometimes asked, what about a fork? If I have the code under the GPL, I can just fork it. Why do I need the agreement? That's true, but it would split the community. And it also wouldn't allow the dual license business model on the fork. So the more sustainable version is to not fork but work under the agreement, work under the current situation. The other question which is asked sometimes is, is there's a model for other projects as well? So could you use that in other projects? And the answer is, there is a certain type of projects where this might actually be a good fit. So the typical use case would be something like a single vendor project where you have one company controlling an open source project and they are following some dual license model. And for that to work, they need a CLA which gives them the rights to also release the proprietary version. And the problem there is that this is an asymmetric setup. So the company has more rights than the community has. And that of course can be a demotivation for people to actually participate in this project. The KD3Q Foundation style setup is a way to balance this. So that there you add something on the other side where the community gets a say in the future of the project and gives some security about the freedom of the project for the future. And this is a way to motivate actually people to contribute because they know, it's not only the company profiting from that but they also give something back and they are obliged to actually do that. That's what the KD3Q Foundation does. One thing to be aware of is that this is a complex thing. The agreement is now 14 pages, not three pages anymore. Most of that is about the question what actually forms Qt, how has that developed? What do we have to take into account for that? But that's actually the thing you need to do and that's a result of these fruitful discussions about how free do we do it? How is the balance between that and how can we balance the interest in a mutually beneficial way? And the other thing which also is, I think quite important, it takes courage to do that. So it takes this courage of the original founders of TrollTech, which said we give it away for free. And this is an important thing because we didn't know if it would work but it actually did. So the KD3Q Foundation, what's the heart of it? It's the freedom, it's a freedom which is also a strong value we have in KDE which is driving our work. And we do that because freedom is good for business, freedom is good for community and freedom is good for the world. And I want to close with a quote from the original announcement. So to prosper in a mutually beneficial fashion. This is what the KDE3Q Foundation set out to do and this is what it did and what it still does. So that's what I wanted to tell you about the KDE3Q Foundation. Thank you.