[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Antonio Larrosa]

On 27/1/20 15:34, Lars Knoll wrote:
> 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.
> 

With everyone talking about how long will fixes for Qt 5.15 be provided to open
source developers (and the common consensus being they'll be available only
around 6 months until ~Jan 2021) I have a question about 5.12.

When Qt 5.12 was released the promise back then was it will be maintained until
5/12/2021 . Is that still true? or will 5.12 not get public maintenance once Qt
6.0 is released just as 5.15?

I find it hard to believe The Qt Company will break already made "contracts"
with the community about LTS life-cycles of released products, but in that
scenario we have a bit of a paradox with 5.12 LTS being maintained for longer
than 5.15 LTS so it would be nice to get some clarification on that.

Also, I have a question in order to clarify the announcement. Which of the next
sentences is true?

1) Once Qt 6.0 is released, there won't be Qt 5.15.x public releases anymore and
Qt developers from The Qt Company will work in a closed branch/git repository
which will only get released to commercial customers.

2) Once Qt 6.0 is released, there won't be Qt 5.15.x public releases anymore but
backported fixes will be accessible at the 5.15 branch of the git repository as
usual.

I guess the answer is 1), but the blog announcement always talks about releases,
which is left to interpretation. So I hope The Qt Company reconsiders and takes
at least the 2) option approach as a way to make the announcement a bit less bad.

--
Antonio Larrosa