[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[NIkolai Marchenko]

You know what bothers me the most about all this? Qt is becoming your
average AAA game developer. They are essentially selling us time savers.
Most of the attached value of the commercial license isn't something that
is inherent to the license but stuff that everyone can do anyway, just with
a (quite) annoying bit of unnecessary effort. They are selling us the
solution to the problem they are the ones creating in the first place. None
of the stuff in the new enforced license is something TQtC aren't going to
do anyway, they are just paywalling it now. Does it sound stupidly
familiar and echoing the Jim Sterling to anyone else?

Login requirement: Spend time entering your credentials.
No offline packages: Spend time compiling qt for your offline system.
No LTS support: spend time finding a decent fork of the otherwise LTS
branch, optionally for community to spend time maintaining it.

All of the above is perfectly possible to do without paying, just very
annoying. Exactly the model of recent AAA games and mobile game offerings.
And Qt isn't even doing it right to boot: you don't sell a solution to the
problem that users can solve themselves. Alternative Qt packagers will
emerge immediately, same as alternative stability branch,

To further nail the similarity to the companies like Bethesda: they have
even backtracked on the "no microtransactions" promises, or to be precise
"no login required for installer" promises. AND tried to cover it up only
to realize it's archived so they can't. Well done, TQtC, well done indeed.



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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> Development at qt-project.org
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>
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