[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Kevin Kofler]

Lars Knoll wrote:
> 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.

So you are going to leave Qt 5.x Free Software users with no short-term 
upgrade path, because 5.15 LTS will be reserved to commercial customers 
only? From a distribution standpoint, this is absolutely ridiculous and 
hostile. We are not going to get all software ported to Qt 6 instantly.

Most distributions are still forced to ship software depending on Qt 4 now. 
Fedora even still ships software depending on Qt 3! For both Qt 3 and 4, 
there was a period where Qt was still providing at least bug fixes for the 
software, which was important to help the transition. We really need that to 
happen for Qt 5 as well. Sure, we can and do backport security fixes (and we 
have to do so for Qt 3 and 4 which you no longer support), but our ability 
to backport complex bug fixes is limited, and it will really hurt to have to 
redo the work that you have to do anyway for your commercial customers.

Please reconsider this policy or at least consider making an exception for 
5.15 LTS (and generally the last release branch before a first-digit major 
version change).

        Kevin Kofler