[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Mathias Hasselmann]

Am 27.01.2020 um 15:34 schrieb Lars Knoll:
> 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).

Are you really sure that it is a good idea to raise the entry barrier 
for trying Qt that much? Personally I only register for software that I 
am conviced I'll keep using. If it requires such registration directly 
at download or during installation already it doesn't even get 
downloaded or installed. Such attitude might seem strange in the times 
of Android, iOS, Windows 10 S, but keep in mind that your customers 
aren't the typicial computer illiterated that simply accept any nonsense 
you do to their privacy, you are targeting computer experts.

BBC Wales just sketched pretty well the rude attitude you are embracing 
with that change: https://twitter.com/Uehmche/status/1217004373970161664

Besides both that barrier combined with that change to LTS releases will 
just teach more people to build and patch Qt from source. Being used to 
that process, having established that process just largely reduces 
motivation to pay for Qt.

Ciao
Mathias