[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Alexander Akulich]

I would expect a significant negative effect on the quality of Qt
shipped in Linux distributions and thus negative effect on the
Qt-based applications and Qt reputation.

A maintainer can assume a bit more backporting, but let's have some
retrospective on the current LTS:
Compared to Qt 5.12.2, the new Qt 5.12.3 provides almost 200 bug fixes [1].
Compared to Qt 5.12.3, the new Qt 5.12.4 provides around 250 bug fixes [2].
This fifth patch release to Qt 5.12 LTS contains almost 280 bug fixes [3].
This sixth patch release for Qt 5.12 LTS series contains more than 50
bug fixes [4].

The number of commits is much more than the number of closed bug reports.
If the last open Qt 5 minor version will have three releases (5.15.0,
5.15.1, 5.15.2) then it is sensible to assume that the commercial Qt
branch will have at least 1000 commits on top of the public one. It is
barely possible for a single maintainer or a single community-driven
distribution to backport that many commits.

[1] https://www.qt.io/blog/2019/04/17/qt-5-12-3-released
[2] https://www.qt.io/blog/2019/06/17/qt-5-12-4-released-support-openssl-1-1-1
[3] https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-5.12.5-released
[4] https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-5.12.6-released

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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