[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Cristián Maureira-Fredes]

On 1/29/20 10:36 AM, Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development wrote:
> Il 29/01/20 09:52, Cristián Maureira-Fredes ha scritto:
>>
>> Currently, you can create a Qt Account with your email
>> and a password, when you received the email, you confirm by clicking on
>> the link, and then you can optionally enter your information.
>> First Name and Last Name are required, but then you can enter
>> any information on these fields. (I didn't check the checkbox
>> to receive information).
> 
> Using a fake identity is a violation of the terms of service, and I 
> wouldn't be surprised that it could be seen as a crime in the EU or in 
> the US. Are you seriously suggesting that?

I'm sorry if you got that impression, I was not.
I was just saying that are the same fields as the mailing list.
The phrase was just referring to the fact that the twitter video that 
was shared, was asking for even birthday as a mandatory field.

> 
>> Doing that, now I have access
>> to the future installer, I can manage my Qt downloads, install the
>> binaries, remove components if I will not use and everything else.
>>
>> How different is this process
>> from registering to this mailing list for example?
> 
> This is a logical fallacy. "Name and email is also what you use to 
> register to file your tax returns, why are you so concerned?"
> 
> I'd wager that the ratio of Qt users reading (if not writing) on these 
> mailing lists vs the total of Qt users is somewhere in the 10^-4 order 
> of magnitude. And, the irony is, we're not even using the Qt Account for 
> managing the subscriptions to this very mailing list!

This is nothing new Giuseppe,
people actively using Qt will have Qt accounts because they either
use our JIRA, and also Gerrit, son for those people, this should not 
make such impact on the usage of the Qt account.

> 
>> IIRC I entered my email, my name, and a password, then I got an email,
>> clicked on the link, verified my name again, and then I was welcomed
>> to the mailing list.
>>
>> But sure, the mailing list is not software, but a service
>> to communicate with others.
>> Since the installer is a service that TQtC provides,
>> for me is really not difficult to understand that I will require
>> an account, after all TQtC is responsible of having a working CI
>> that can generate those binaries for your convenience.
>> Sure, this was not there before, but is it really so strange? and rude?
> 
> It is in a world of software-as-a-commodity (and especially UI toolkits 
> as a commodity), as well as in a world which is (finally) more privacy 
> sensitive. People don't want companies to collect their personal data 
> any more "just for the sake of it", but especially, any wall you raise 
> that prevents the installation of your software to be a series of clicks 
> on "next next next finish" simply makes your software much less attractive.
> 
> (Not to mention that, as already pointed out, this could be also solved 
> by allowing some OpenID providers to authenticate an user)

I really think we are having this discussion with different sets of 
people in mind.

> 
> 
>> Regarding the LTS decision, you can take it from another point
>> of view:
>> 5.15 will only have 2 or 3 bug fixing releases, and so will all
>> the LTS versions in the future.
>> Since TQtC has commercial costumers, we will internally fork
>> the latest bug fix release, and will start adding patches on
>> top of that on request of the costumers, but hey! all those
>> patches will be on Gerrit, so if they are important for your work,
>> you can just cherry pick them to your local Qt and re-build.
> 
> Ok, finally some answers here.
> 
> I don't understand this model at all: if in the long run 5.15 is going 
> to be maintained as a private fork, but all the patches to it are going 
> to be public on gerrit, it's going to take approximately 20 minutes for 
> someone to
> * set up a gerrit stream
> * get all the merged patches targeting this "5.15-private" branch
> * cherry pick them on 5.15.x
> * publish the result (5.15.oss-latest) on github or KDE or so
> 
> The net result will be that 5.15 will be forked twice (TQC will have an 
> internal commercial fork, the OSS community a public fork), and that Qt 
> will have lost all 3rd party contributions to 5.15 (cf. Thiago's email).
> 
> Isn't this a lose/lose?
> 
> My 2 c,



-- 
Dr. Cristián Maureira-Fredes
R&D Manager

The Qt Company GmbH
Erich-Thilo-Straße 10
D-12489 Berlin
https://qt.io