[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Mark De Wit]

I've been working really hard over the past few years to get Qt used more within my organisation.  However, mandating that our 45 developers all register Qt accounts is a complete non-starter, especially if only 2 or 3 of them actually work with UI on a day-to-day basis.   For the rest of them, Qt is a tool that's required to build the software, the same as every other 3rd party module that they're forced to install & endure.

This may well be a show-stopper for future adoption of Qt for me.  (on top of Qt Widget issues/limitations that turn into blocking issues which isn't helping my cause either...)

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Lars Knoll
Sent: 27 January 2020 14:35
To: Qt development mailing list <development at qt-project.org>
Subject: [Development] Changes to Qt offering

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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