[Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

[Jason H]

> Can we agree to keep the bashing out of this channel?

You raise important questions. First, what is "bashing", and where is it appropriate? Or, as I see my behavior, where is being critical of Digia appropriate?

As a long-time Qt user (first commercial license was for 3.3.3) I've seen it go through many phases. Nokia LGPL Qt was so great, but I've watched erosion of that openness. I formulate my opinions based on ecosystems that I participate in, like Arduino, React, Node, etc. I see IMHO criticism of Digia is on the rise (https://www.qt.io/blog/commercial-lts-qt-5.15.3-released). I also get a lot of emails privately in agreement with my criticisms. So where is the proper feedback channel?

I think the situation is exacerbated because of the confluence of two decisions on how the Qt 5.15/Qt 6 transition:
1. Qt 6 does not contain all the modules Qt 5.15 did.
2. Qt 5.15 was a LTS, but the releases after 5.15.2 are commercial only.

If Qt 6 had contained all the modules that 5.15 did, OpenSource users would be able to switch to 6.
From https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/whatsnew60.html#removed-modules-in-qt-6-0 the following modules are not in Qt6:
Qt Android Extras	androidextras
Qt Bluetooth	bluetooth
Qt Charts	charts
Qt Data Visualization	datavisualization
Qt Graphical Effects		only QML types
Qt Location	location
Qt Mac Extras	macextras
Qt Multimedia	multimedia
Qt Multimedia Widgets	multimediawidgets
Qt NFC	nfc
Qt Positioning	positioning
Qt Purchasing	purchasing
Qt Remote Objects	remoteobjects
Qt Script	qtscript
Qt SCXML	scxml
Qt Script Tools	scripttools
Qt Sensors	sensors
Qt Serial Bus	serialbus
Qt Serial Port	serialport
Qt Speech	texttospeech
Qt WebChannel	webchannel
Qt WebEngine	webenginecore
Qt WebSockets	websockets
Qt WebView	webview
Qt Windows Extras	winextras
Qt X11 Extras	x11extras
Qt XML Patterns	xmlpatterns

Qt 6.1 then adds back (though some modules got rolled into other modules):
Qt Charts
Qt DataVis
Qt Lottie
Qt SCXML and StateMachine
Qt VirtualKeyboard

This leaves open source users of the Qt6 missing modules in a bind. I decline to attribute this to malice, but one way to fix the situation is to provide the 5.15 non-commercial updates until Qt6 is complete (6.2? allegedly includes Serial and WebSockets, but plenty aren't yet included, also: https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2020-November/040704.html) and then just have Qt 6 LTS as commercial only.  I had also thought that the 5.15 LTS was only going to be limited by commerical-only offline packages, that online 5.15 LTS would still be fine.

I would even be fine with there being only one LTS as opposed to how it is done now with multiple overlapping LTSs. (Currently 5.12 and 5.15 are LTS)

I don't know how to square Digia's behavior with Qt's Open Governance model (https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_Project_Open_Governance) ? I'm trying to where in the open source/governance stuff it was decided that making LTS commercial only was 1) approved by the Open Governance Model 2) exhibits the principals talked about in the Open Governance Model.

Let me be clear: I still think Qt (the library) is really great amazing stuff and want to thank every single contributor for it. But this shenanigans with the licensing is well, shenanigans. Show me another "open source" project that goes commerical-only in the LTS branch? The criticism is warranted. By that alone, not to mention having a not-yet-viable-next-version.