Award From Qt Developers Recognizes Best Open Source Development Tools

Valgrind takes first prize for ‘effortless debugging’

Oslo, Norway, 14 May - 2008 - Trolltech, a global leader in cross-platform application frameworks, has announced the winners of its inaugural Qt Open Source Development Award.

The winner of the USD 3,000 first prize, with 28 per cent of the votes cast, was Valgrind. Valgrind is a programming tool suite for memory debugging, thread debugging, time profiling and space profiling. Trolltech’s Qt and Qtopia developers valued Valgrind’s ability to take the pain out of debugging by automatically detecting memory management and threading errors. As one Qt developer put it, “With Valgrind, there’s no need to sprinkle code with printf() statements any more. We don’t even need to recompile: we just run the program under Valgrind and it points straight to any issues.

"The project's aim has always been to provide high quality, open source debugging and profiling tools.  It's good to see our tools are proving useful," said Julian Seward, Valgrind project lead.

The runners-up, each awarded USD 1,000, were cross-platform mouse and keyboard sharing tool Synergy, with 20 per cent of the votes, and editing tool Vim, with 17 per cent of the votes.

 
The Qt Open Source Development Award committee has a mission to identify the most effective, easy to use, and enjoyable open source tools in the market. Qt and Qtopia developers strive for productivity when coding and applaud open source applications that make it easier for them to develop state-of-the-art framework tools.

 
Commenting on the award, Lars Knoll, Trolltech’s VP of engineering said, “We use a lot of tools and applications as we develop new releases of Qt and Qtopia, and naturally, many of these are open source tools too. We decided it was high time to let more people know about our positive experience with those tools and to give something back to the talented developers who made them. Open source tools have contributed to make the new release of Qt 4.4 more powerful than ever. They make our working lives easier, more efficient and more fun!”

 
The Qt Open Source Development Award will be an ongoing initiative driven and voted for by Trolltech’s team of Qt and Qtopia developers as well as Qt support engineers to recognize innovative and functionality-rich open source products. 

See our Troll Labs blog post about this award

 

About Trolltech:

Trolltech provides cross-platform software development frameworks and application platforms. Trolltech’s Qt is used in popular software such as Skype®, Google Earth, Adobe® Photoshop® Elements, Lucasfilm® and by more than 5000 customers worldwide. Trolltech’s Qtopia® has enabled a new generation of exciting consumer devices such as mobile handsets, video-phones, set-top boxes and media players. Trolltech’s software has shipped in more than 10 million devices.

Trolltech’s products enable companies to easily build and deploy software across a wide range of operating systems and electronic devices. The company serves desktop and embedded application providers, as well as consumer electronics and mobile vendors, who face challenges in delivering user-friendly and differentiated software. Trolltech enables customers to accelerate innovation, shorten time to market and increase revenues. Trolltech’s software improves the user experience by increasing the appeal and quality of customer's applications on desktop and devices. The future proof Qt software allows developers to code less, create more and deploy anywhere.

Trolltech supports open source and commercial customers. The company has offices in California, U.S.A.; Brisbane, Australia; Beijing, China; Berlin and Munich, Germany; Oslo, Norway. It is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol TROLL. For more information about Trolltech, please visit www.trolltech.com.