[Development] Renamed (again): Qt licensing shenanigans (again)

[Scott Bloom]

The sad part in all this.. the amount of negative discussion about Qt, when TQtC could fix this easily, simply maintain LTS at the opensource license.

If they want patch releases in general not to be open source fixes, fine.  Ie 6.1 is opensource, 6.1.1 is not..  But when a LTS is released, that is major build and all its patches are open source .

It solves their problem of spending too many resources on unpaid for code, and the community that supports them, doesn’t get left out in the cold on a major version their projects are sticking to.

Maybe they follow the PT barnum any press is good press a little to far?


-----Original Message-----
From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Jason H
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2021 11:20
To: Rui Oliveira <ruilvo at hotmail.com>
Cc: development at qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Development] Renamed (again): Qt licensing shenanigans (again)

>
> I agree with Jason: Doing the "no LTS for FOSS" at the moment of the
> 5.15->6.0 change was really a foul play, imho.

I'm currently attributing it to a license decision that for any other release (say if there was a 5.16) would be fine, but in reality was temporally coupled to the release of 6.0, and what 6.0 composed, which was an unusual and separate decision. And these decisions could have been made separately by different people and not realize the implications of the two combined until it was pointed out.

It's a mistake that can be easily rectified. But what happens next is going to show the true character of the Qt Corporation. If the decision was made intentionally, or even so but isn't rectified, then that's going to affect those open source users who don't legally need a license, don't want or need Qt 6, but just need access to patches to keep users happy. I can't really see that as s motivation for a commercial license money grab, because in theory, by 6.2 things will be back to normal. Starving open source license users of patch level changes to get them to  convert to commercial for what, a year? Doesn't make sense so me, so I'm not attributing it to malice.

What I'd like to see is:
- Open Source LTS patches restored until 6.x is at parity.
- An agreement that never again will Qt have a Major version release
  that isn't in parity with the previous feature release (meaning dropped
  feature have to be dropped Before the major release for at least one version)

Ultimately I think this was a learning experience.






_______________________________________________
Development mailing list
Development at qt-project.org
https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/development