[Development] Commercial LTS Qt 5.15.4 released

[Jason H]

> Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2021 at 12:00 PM
> From: "Frank Hemer" <frank at hemer.org>
> To: development at qt-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Development] Commercial LTS Qt 5.15.4 released
>
> On Mittwoch, 12. Mai 2021 17:51:51 CEST Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > On Wednesday, 12 May 2021 08:30:52 PDT Frank Hemer wrote:
> > > On Mittwoch, 12. Mai 2021 17:26:50 CEST Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > > > Even maintainers who like me don't get access to the source, it's
> > > > important
> > > > to know the release was made.
> > >
> > > Not having access to sources for maintainers is simply ridiculous.
> >
> > The problem is licensing, not Qt Company's willingness. They offered when
> > this all began. But since it's not open source, I can't look at it.
>
> Hmm ... to me sounds like the cat is biting its tail ...
> (formerly) os project, os maintainers, os contributors but locked out due to
> not being os.
>
> I really can't express my regret for decisions in this direction - and I AM a
> licenseholder!

Same. License holder and a hobbiest. I don't understand how 5.15.2 is the last
non-commerial LTS, which is not a LTS of all future releases are commercial.
This is entirely Digia's unwillingness to support the open source community
that made this toolkit so popular.

I could see if Commerical LTS was different from open source LTSs, but there
are no open source LTS (5.15.3 or 5.15.4) available in the installer. They just
aren't providing open source LTSs anymore. I'm sure the code exists somewhere,
but they bait-and-switched us to using the online installer, then required
accounts, and then... no LTS for you!

This has forced me to reconsider Qt as essentially closed source, I will be
brushing up on my web dev skills and just going electron/cordova in the future.
I wonder what this means for KDE. They probably have enough infrastructure to
weather this storm, but the average person will just choose HTML5, the vast
majority already do. I'm regretting having endorsed this library in the past.