The announcement by Trolltech today, offering its highly rated Qtopia platform for mobile phones under the GPL, completes a circle linking several hot trends: mobile computing, telephony, and free software.

Qtopia has just undergone a major new release, adding such features as the Safe Execution Environment (a kind of sandbox for native code), strong support for WiFi, and integration with the WebKit browser engine. It’s a lot to give away for free. Based on Trolltech’s Qt graphics libraries and supporting C++ development as well as a JVM, Qtopia is a graphical environment found in a huge number of devices ranging from the Motorola Razr V8 to automobile navigation systems and medical equipment–and of course, Trolltech’s own Greenphone.

Read the  complete story here