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

[Thiago Macieira]

On Tuesday, 4 February 2020 01:41:42 PST Benjamin TERRIER wrote:
> However this raised several questions:
> 
>    - How do we know which commit to cherry pick?

We don't.

>    - 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.

We don't get access to those until months later.

>    - 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.

That's permissible today and will continue to be. The proponents of such a 
fork just need to gather enough developers to maintain it and sufficient 
computing power to run a build CI like the one Qt Company does.

>    - 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?

It does not say that. It says that the KDE Free Qt Foundation receives the 
code under the BSD, not that the Foundation releases to the rest of the world 
as BSD. It can choose to give to a single entity under that licence to re-
bootstrap the commercial ecosystem. Also note this only applies to the "KDE 
Windowing System", which are systems that KDE (rather, Plasma Desktop these 
days) runs on. The mobile platforms are not included.

Anyway, the "within 12 months" is the key part. So long as the sources of the 
release are published within 12 months, the Foundation's agreement never kicks 
in.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel System Software Products