[Development] Changes to Qt offering

Wed Jan 29 20:51:15 CET 2020

> You obviously don’t trust that TQtC will treat the data the
online-installer either demands or requires with the appropriate
confidence.
> So, shouldn't you build Qt from sources? Your IP address is PII, after
all. Why did you trust that The Qt Company didn’t collect personal
> data from you previously - just because you didn’t have to enter your
email address?

Those who use Qt professionally will most probably register with their
company emails. Based on this information, The Qt Company might
theoretically estimate the number of developers at this particular company
and try to pursue the sales much more aggressively. There are companies
using the LGPL version of Qt in their products and are happy about it. From
what I see (as a private user of Qt since Qt 3) for the past months or
maybe even a year, The Qt Company has been trying to confuse (potential)
users of the open-source version of Qt with vague wording and demands to
contribute to the library.

Take, for example, the latest Maintenance Tool:
[image: image.png]
So what we read in the first bullet point is just misleading: "You must not
mix software, developed with the commercial license with the code developed
with the Open Source license". Put into context, with "Qt Open Source" as
the page title, a potential user understands this as "you cannot use
open-source Qt if you develop commercial software", and this is wrong. You
can use the LGPL modules of Qt in your commercial software if you comply
with LGPL, which does not necessarily mean distributing the source code of
your software.

For the past year or two, the Downloads page at qt.io was redesigned at
least several times. With every redesign, it became better and better but
there was a version or two where you couldn't even find a link to the
open-source versions of Qt. Let us look at the version as of May 2019 (
https://web.archive.org/web/20190516121937/https://www.qt.io/): Can you
find a link to the open-source version of Qt at the landing page? No, but
you see "Start free trial" which implies that Qt is a commercial product,
and if you scroll all the way down, you see "Buy now" and "Contact
request". So where is the open-source Qt? Now if you know that you have to
choose "Start free trial" in order to get the open-source version, you get
to a comparison table, where on the left side (the commercial version)
everything is green, and the right side consists of "warning" and "alarm"
symbols except for the very first one (essentials). If you read the text
next to the symbols, it turns out to be not so bad but the visual
impression has been made.

But, as said, the web site has become much better in terms of finding the
open-source edition of Qt and covering what the open-source edition means.

So yes, although I do have a valid Qt account because I have willingly
chosen to contribute to Qt, I don't think that TQC will treat the
online-installer data with the appropriate confidence. Judging by the TQC
marketing trying to obscure the open-source nature of the Qt Framework
previously, I would tend to think that the gathered emails will be used to
push the commercial version of Qt too aggressively. Firstly, because there
is no technical reason to start requiring the accounts in order to download
the binaries (we could download the binaries before, without the account).
Secondly, I think that this is obvious that the gathered email addresses
will be used for marketing and sales. The Qt Company just coerces people to
accepting that they will be contacted by the TQC sales. If I want to
download the open-source version if Qt, I usually don't want to be bothered
by marketing people. Yes, I can download the sources anonymously and
compile them, but this is not the way a new user unfamiliar with the Qt
framework would prefer. Yes, there are Linux packages without the online
installer and Linux users are generally more used to building stuff from
source, but there is plenty of Windows developers who like their
installers. There are also a lot of students who use Qt at their
universities (all of them are new users of Qt!), and they usually learn how
things work with other frameworks and technologies, and this is not always
in favor of Qt.

As already mentioned 100x on this thread, my personal opinion as a private
person is that TQC should leave Qt more accessible, instead of putting
walls, in order to improve the acceptance and spread the library. Again, as
already mentioned, it is hard to find C++ developers, let alone developers
familiar with Qt. The Qt Company also wants to earn money, and we all
accept and support that, but why not making money by providing first-class
support and professional services instead of enormous license costs?

Cheers
Dmitriy

On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 5:10 PM Volker Hilsheimer <volker.hilsheimer at qt.io>
wrote:

> > On 29 Jan 2020, at 15:20, Benjamin TERRIER <b.terrier at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 29 Jan 2020 at 14:10, Cristián Maureira-Fredes <
> Cristian.Maureira-Fredes at qt.io> wrote:
> >>
> >> but for Windows/macOS this might have three solutions (maybe more):
> >> - Using package managers that provide Qt,
> >> - Download and compile Qt by themselves,
> >> - Create an account and use the installer.
> >
> >
> > How is any of these a solution to the fact that your a putting a barrier
> for new users?
> > These are just 3 bad solutions to a problem that did not exist yesterday
> and that we have to deal with
> > because you removed the 2 main points of entry for new Qt users: the
> offline installer and
> > the non-privacy-violating online installer.
>
> Hm, if the problem didn’t exist, then why did the solutions exist? Package
> managers on Windows and macOS provide Qt in the past, after all, and
>
> $ sudo apt-get install -y qtcreator
> PS C:\Users\vohi> choco install qtcreator
> $ brew install qt-creator
>
> give me a Qt development environment on Linux, Windows, and macOS.
>
>
> You obviously don’t trust that TQtC will treat the data the
> online-installer either demands or requires with the appropriate
> confidence. So, shouldn't you build Qt from sources? Your IP address is
> PII, after all. Why did you trust that The Qt Company didn’t collect
> personal data from you previously - just because you didn’t have to enter
> your email address?
>
>
> >> Good thing that you replied in any case,
> >> because I really think we should separate the different use cases:
> >>
> >> - For people already using Qt, with Qt accounts,
> >> that's not a problem.
> >
> > This, and a lot of what TQC employees are saying on these changes, does
> sound like the famous sentence
> > from Don Mattrick about the Xbox One: "We have a product for people who
> aren't able to get some form of connectivity; it's called Xbox 360."
> >
> > Back to the topic, I have a Qt account, I do NOT want to use it to
> install Qt.
> > I am pretty sure we will have community provided offline, and even maybe
> online, installers soon enough.
>
>
> I wonder where all this love for the Qt installer comes from. I personally
> consider “sudo apt-get install -y qtcreator” or “brew install qt-creator”
> or “choco install qtcreator" to be vastly superior to using the installer
> UI, and very easily integrated in VM provisioning. Any energy spent on
> making sure that the versions we get from those package repos is up-to-date
> would be worth a lot more (to me) than building another installer.
>
>
> Volker
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Development mailing list
> Development at qt-project.org
> https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/development
>
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