[Development] Renamed: Running a service for Qt community

[Jason H]

> Sent: Friday, May 21, 2021 at 8:57 AM
> From: "Kai Köhne" <Kai.Koehne at qt.io>
> To: "Benjamin TERRIER" <b.terrier at gmail.com>, "development at qt-project.org" <development at qt-project.org>
> Subject: Re: [Development] Renamed: Running a service for Qt community
>
> > From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Benjamin TERRIER
> > Subject: Re: [Development] Renamed: Running a service for Qt community
> > 
> > On Thu, 20 May 2021 at 17:18, Jason H <mailto:jhihn at gmx.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Anyway, these issues aren't insurmountable, apparently they can be changed with the stroke of a pen. (Where is Qt's Open Governance? - still think I misunderstood what that was about)
> >
> > Since TQC alone can decide that the Qt Project won't release Qt 5.15.3+  without consulting the mailing list and going through the lazy consensus decision process, I think it's safe to say that Open Governance is dead.
> 
> I don't claim that the LTS decision was fully in line with the Open Governance process as stated in https://quips-qt-io.herokuapp.com/quip-0002.html .
>
> But Open Governance is IMO serving the purpose of steering the development of the Qt code quite well. I think we can do better in also discussing designs etc on the mailing list, but well...

It seems to be a fatal flaw that the licensing, and the changes to, are not part of the open governance. It looks like there is only the ability to change and vote on code... What if that code commit is a license file ;-) ?
  
> > Can we conclude that contributions from outside the company are going to be nearly
> > non-existent?

I'd be more likely to contribute code if I was able to contribute it as LGPL it was available to users as LGPL.
 
> I hope not 😊 You can check out some statistics about code contributions at qt-project.org . There's also Thiago's generated statistics : https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/ 

Measuring the reaction to decisions like this change of license decision in terms of lines of code is surely a lagging indicator. And people may not be aware until they try to use the online installer to update, which they probably aren't. Or visit the blogs. I've been going over the history, the commercial release of 5.15 was announced in advance but was worded in a way as to not mention that there wouldn't also be an open source release.  ( https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020 )

"LTS and offline installer to become commercial-only
Starting with Qt 5.15, long term support (LTS) will only be available to commercial customers. This means open-source users will receive patch-level releases of 5.15 until the next minor release will become available. This means that we will handle Qt 5.15 in the same way as e.g. 5.13 or 5.14 for open source users"

It is my understanding after reading that, that open source users would still get patch-level releases (5.15.x) through the online installer. What actually happed though is as soon as Qt6.0.1 was released, the access to 5.15 patch releases were over. Access to the patch release vs support are different things though. As I read it, the /support of 5.15/ would end for open source users, who would only be supported on Qt6.0.1 at that time.  However this is not what happened, as access to 5.15 patches were cut off. This is a broken idea because not all the modules included at 5.15 were supported by 6.0. 6.0 is actually incomplete. 6.1 is also incomplete. This is hostile and unfair to open source user to deny them patches that already exist because of separate engineering/release decisions (which I also take issue with) to release an incomplete 6.0.  What needs to happen is Qt 5.15 needs to go back to open source patch releases until 6.x is at feature parity with 5.15. 

It's the right thing to do.