[Development] Commercial-only 6.2 LTS phase starts: Closing the 6.2 branch(es) on 20th April

[Kevin Kofler]

Benjamin TERRIER wrote:
> As much as I dislike The Qt Company unfriendly behaviour toward LGPL users
> and the fact that IMHO The Qt Company seems to be taking decisions that
> should be taken by the Qt Project,

This whole "open governance" thing is and has always been a PR farce. There 
is nothing open at all, all the decisions are taken by the company.

A truly openly governed project would never have made such a hostile 
decision.

And the KDE Free Qt Foundation contract is also completely worthless because 
it has that ridiculously long 12-month grace period that The Qt Company is 
now exploiting, defeating the whole purpose of the contract. (And even the 
penalty if Qt were to stop honoring the contract altogether is not all that 
useful, because it only allows releasing the then-current release of Qt 
under the BSD license, no guaranteed access to further development, and no 
penal damages that would discourage the breach of contract. This is not all 
that much more useful to the community than just forking the LGPL version 
under the LGPL as the LGPL already allows.)

> The biggest issue was The Qt Company dropping open source support for Qt
> 5.15 while Qt 6 was far from ready.

Indeed, but why is your sentence using the past tense? KDE Plasma and many 
applications are still stuck on Qt 5 and we are still getting only one year 
old "new" releases. So this is still an issue!

> IMHO the fact that Qt .1 or .2 releases are seemingly never usable for
> some users because of new bugs and regressions is a symptom of quality
> issues that should not be solved by an LTS.

The only solution to that issue is probably longer release cycles.

Qt 3 releases happened when they were done rather than on a fixed schedule, 
the time between 3.1 and 3.2 was more than a year. Qt 4 releases happened on 
average every 9 months. With Qt 5, that went down to 6 months. This seems to 
be too fast (both to maintain stability and for users to keep up), leading 
to the demand for LTS releases. (The special case of the last release series 
before a new incompatible version, e.g., 5.15, is separate, that one  
necessarily needs LTS, but not only for commercial users!)

Of course, with most commercial users completely ignoring the non-LTS 
releases, *they* are up to releases around every 18 months (that have been 
tested by us), so *they* do not see that issue. And as a result, The Qt 
Company does not care, because they do not give a darn about Free Software 
users.

        Kevin Kofler