[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Alexander Akulich]

Your decision is not a reason to contribute more. It is going to hurt
the ecosystem because it makes it harder to get new developers and
users.

In some of my previous companies, we had a long release cycle so as a
Linux developer I could justify my paid time spent on upstreaming a
fix to get it included into the binary offline installers for all
platforms in about a month. The new policy cross-off this reason to
submit fixes.

You already made life harder by licensing Qt under GPL v3. Of course,
it has pros and cons, but let's jump to the consequence: we have
Sailfish OS out of the boat. The OS could have a modern Qt and we
actually could have people working on the upstream QtDeclarative, Qt
Quick Controls 2 and other modules in the paid time, but. The OS
developers have complex agreements with a number of important business
partners and for some of them, it is unacceptable to follow some of
the tivoization-related GPL v3 clauses. It is hard to explain to
managers the profit from a new version or collaboration with the Qt
community. (From a business PoV) it makes very little sense to pay for
some abstract "technical prettiness" as long as Qt 5.6 gives you the
money.

On the professional side, I suddenly understand how much I'm depending
on Qt. I spent my paid and spare time to make the world and the Qt
world better, but now I'm sad and disappointed. The world is changing
so fast. Years ago I taught students to the light side with C++, Qt,
and open source. I can't imagine asking dozens of students to register
and get Qt Account. Nowadays and with this step, I see even fewer
reasons to learn C++ and Qt.

I respect and appreciate the work of all Qt developers. Thank you all
for the amazing technology. Long live Qt! I hope we won't have to
fork.

On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 5:35 PM Lars Knoll <lars.knoll at qt.io> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> The Qt Company has done some adjustments to the Qt will be offered in the future. Please check out https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020 .
>
> The change consists of three parts.
>
> One is a change in policy regarding the LTS releases, where the LTS part of a release is in the future going to be restricted to commercial customers. All bug fixes will (as agreed on the Qt Contributor Summit) go into dev first. Backporting bug fixes is something that the Qt Company will take care of for these LTS branches. We’ve seen over the past that LTS support is something mainly required by large companies, and should hopefully help us get some more commercial support for developing Qt further.
>
> The second change is that a Qt Account will be in the future required for binary packages. Source code will continue to be available as currently. This will simplify distribution and integration with the Marketplace. 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 (Jira, code review and the forums all require a Qt Account).
>
> 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.
>
> None of these changes should affect how Qt is being developed. There won’t be any changes to Open Governance or the open development model.
>
> Best regards,
> Lars
>
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