[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Jason H]

So I've had a night to think about and react to this.

I want Qt to be successful and make lots of money in addition to taking over the world. I can appreciate this approach as a way to drive sales. After all, anything that gets Qt for Mobile more complete is very much appreciated. ;-)

However I think these decisions are moving Qt in the wrong direction. It's making Qt less accessible, not more. Even something as trivial as the skip button in the online installer causes a lot of friction. At a time when the cross platform toolkits are proliferating, (mainly Webkit based technologies (Electron, ReactNative, etc)) and interest in C++ is waning, adding friction is not a plus. Or an alternative is true: Qt has crushed it with auto manufacturers and doesn't care about any other segment anymore. (The behavior seems to indicate this, maybe not auto exclusively but if you look at all the recent additions, they've all been targeted to the vehicle space (flagrant speculation))

Also, I absolutely require headless binary install. I would actively rid Qt from systems (outside of mobile) and move to Python (and not PyQt) if I lost this ability. 

In short, I am disappointed to hear the changes. But all the news out of Qt has been disappointing as of late: 
- this announcement
- no mobile progress
- the previous license changes Tukka announced (QtPDF, etc: https://www.qt.io/blog/change-in-open-source-licensing-of-qt-wayland-compositor-qt-application-manager-and-qt-pdf)

There's been a lot of taking away and not a lot of providing. Is Qt still useful? Sure, but the vector is pointing in the wrong direction.


> Sent: Monday, January 27, 2020 at 9:34 AM
> From: "Lars Knoll" <lars.knoll at qt.io>
> 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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