[2] Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng (the original developers of Qt and the CEO and President, respectively, of Trolltech) 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.

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.

[7][8] On 14 January 2009 Qt version 4.5 was relicensed, adding LGPL as licensing option.

[13][14] Decision-making takes place in a process the project describes as "lazy consensus".

[15] The project facilitates online communication among its developers and community members through public forums,[16] mailing lists,[17] and wiki pages.