[Interest] Fwd: [Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Benjamin TERRIER]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2020 at 00:20, Hetherton, Lachlan (Data61, Docklands GS) <
Lachlan.Hetherton at data61.csiro.au> wrote:

> Hi there,
>
>    - LTS will be exclusive to commercial users. Open source users will
>    not get LTS patch versions after the next minor version is released.
>    It is not clear at this point if this restriction applies to binary
>    releases only and people will still be allowed to compile LTS from source,
>    or if the restriction will be applied on the sources themselves and
>    LTS will be proprietary software.
>
> Has there been any clarification on this? Will the source for the LTS
> branches be made available to Open Source users? Or will the license on
> them be changed to be available to commercial customers only?
>
>
>

Hi,

It is still not clear. From what was discussed on the development mailing
list (
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2020-January/subject.html
),
patches for the LTS will first be pushed on the public dev branch. From
there they will be cherry-picked in a private LTS branch.

So according to The Qt Company, open source users can *just* cherry pick
these patches themselves if the want.

However this raised several questions:

   - How do we know which commit to cherry pick?
   - What about patches that fix the LTS but are not required on dev (Qt
   6), or even patches that target classes or files that were removed between
   Qt 5.15 and 6.
   Obviously they won't be, or even cannot be, pushed to dev.
   - What about the risk of having a community fork i.e. a community
   maintained LTS branch, possibly outside of Qt official repos meaning that
   this branch may be GPL/LGPL only, without the possibility for
   The Qt Company to sell under commercial license commits pushed directly
   to this branch.
   - What about the KDE Free Qt Foundation and its agreement with The Qt
   Company that states that if The Qt Company were to release a commercial Qt
   version without releasing a corresponding open source version
   within 12 months, then Qt will be available under a BSD license?

Cheers,

Benjamin
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