[Development] Dropping MinGW support in Qt 6 (Was: HEADS-UP: QStringLiteral)

[Kyle Edwards]

On Wed, 2019-08-21 at 21:22 +0200, Elvis Stansvik wrote:
> Why not just ship those DLLs? I wouldn't call that "verboten"
> (forbidden), just a bit more to do for deployment.

It's not "verboten", but it's also not as straightforward as
redistributing free software like MinGW.

From https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/productinfo/2015-red
istribution-vs :

"If you have a validly licensed copy of such software, you may copy and
distribute with your program the unmodified form of the files listed
below, subject to the License Terms for the software."

This sounds to me like you have to download a copy of Visual Studio
before redistributing the DLLs, and agree to all of the licensing
terms. (I highly doubt that this would/could actually be enforced in
any meaningful way, but for people who are picky about open source vs
proprietary licenses, this is still another unwanted hoop to jump
through.)

On the other hand, the terms of MinGW are quite clear: it's an MIT-like 
license which allows you to redistribute with only minimal requirements
(retain the copyright notice) ( http://www.mingw.org/license ).

Kyle