[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer]

On 20/01/27 02:34, Lars Knoll wrote:
> Hi all,
[snip]
> 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).

I want to make a note here. I have been maintaining Qt in Debian since the last
days of Qt4. I have been proxying stuff and people from one world to the other
for more than 7 years already.

Note that I fully understand and agree to the fact that an account is needed
because of the CLA, and that this is needed by the Qt company to remain healthy
too. But it is also the greatest barrier for lots of contributors.

We have already lost lots of opportunities due to this. Again, I understand that
this is necessary, but thinking that the proposed change will help into getting
more Open Source contributions is sadly a misguided concept.

What would help here is being more ubiquitous: better widget handling, better
open source integration (hello users of unstable private API outside of Qt
itself, or people needing to use private API to provide... themes!),
and maybe even the commercial proposal many of us did in previous mails.

But then again, the fact of forcing more accounts and hoping to have more open
source contributions is... flaky to say the least.

Cheers, Lisandro.