[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Frederik Schwarzer]

Am 27.01.2020 15:34 schrieb Lars Knoll:

Hi,

> The second change is that a Qt Account will be in the future required
> for binary packages.

We (as an embedded software company) depend a lot on commercial hardware 
with the software tools that are provided by the hardware vendors. The 
most annoying part of that is the need to log in for downloading that 
software. For those vendors there is no reason to require a log in 
technically. The software is not tied to the hardware or anything. It's 
probably just for data collection reasons. It sometimes just takes hours 
before they call your phone trying to sell you something. ...
What this leads to here is that someone creates an account and puts some 
version of the software on our internal server. Everyone then uses that 
version instead of registering yet another account. The software on our 
server reaches back years and there is no plan updating. That's what 
happens if you put barriers in front of people. You get users who use 
old version.


>  In addition, we want open source users to contribute to Qt or the Qt 
> ecosystem. Doing so is only possible with a valid Qt Account

I do not believe that requiring an account leads to more contributions. 
It just leads to more emails in yet another database that will 
eventually be found open to the public due to some misconfiguration. 
Only collect personal data if it is really needed.


> The third change is that The Qt Company will in the future also offer
> a lower priced product for small businesses. That small business
> product is btw not limited to mobile like the one Digia had some years
> ago, but covers all of Qt for Device Creation.

That however, seems good news. :)

Regards,
Frederik