Trolltech and KDE Cooperate on Cross-Platform Multimedia Programming Framework

Phonon Project Demonstrates how Commercial and Open Source Projects Can Work Together for Mutual Gain

Oslo, Norway and Tuebingen, Germany, 13 December - 2007 - Trolltech®, the leading cross-platform software development company, and KDE e.V. today announced a technical collaboration on the development of Phonon, a cross-platform multimedia framework that makes it simple for programmers of all experience levels to incorporate multimedia functionality into their applications.

Phonon was initially developed by the KDE community and will be part of the upcoming KDE 4.0 release. Trolltech has now extended Phonon so it can be used on all major desktop operating systems, including Windows® and Mac® OS X.  Additionally, Trolltech is contributing its code into the KDE source code repository and has licensed it under the LGPL.

Phonon makes it easier than ever before to include multimedia playback in C++ applications, and most operations can now be accomplished with very little code. The original code for Phonon included a single, Xine-based backend that worked only on UNIX and Linux platforms. Trolltech has created additional backend implementations for GStreamer on Linux, plus backends for Windows and Mac OS X.

Trolltech will incorporate Phonon into the company’s upcoming Qt® 4.4 release, currently scheduled to be released at the end of Q1 2008.

By developing Phonon components within the globally accessible public KDE source repository, Phonon developers are able to watch and participate in the development of Trolltech's Phonon back-end code and library code contributions. This also allows the community to evaluate and provide input into the work being done by Trolltech’s internal development team. KDE, in turn, benefits by having Trolltech's employed developers contribute to the ongoing development and maintenance of Phonon, freeing KDE developers to work on other aspects of the desktop. . This is a marked change from how open source libraries are usually integrated into commercial products, which has typically involved pulling snapshots of the open source code into the commercial product. Additionally, the Windows and Mac OS X backends will enable KDE4 applications running on these platforms to include multimedia functionality.

About KDE
KDE is an international technology team that creates integrated Free/Open Source Software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE's products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. Building on the cross-platform capabilities of Trolltech®'s Qt®, KDE4's full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.