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

[Benjamin TERRIER]

Hi all,

As some of you may already know, The Qt Company has posted a blog post
about "Qt offers" and Lars has send an email about it to the development
mailing list.
It seems that the interest mailing list has been forgotten.

Since the subject of the blog post and Lars' email is of interest to all Qt
users, I believe it makes sense to share this news not only in the mailing
list for Qt contributors,
but also in the mailing list for all Qt users.

For the lazy ones here are the highlights of the news:

   - 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.
   - Offline installers will not be available for open source users.
   - The online installer will *require* a Qt Account (to put this in
   context of history see
   https://www.qt.io/blog/2015/05/06/changing-qt-account-to-be-optional-in-the-online-installer
   ).
   - A new commercial offer will be available for small businesses.

For more details, please read Lars email below.

Cheers,

Benjamin

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Lars Knoll <lars.knoll at qt.io>
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2020 at 15:35
Subject: [Development] Changes to Qt offering
To: Qt development mailing list <development at qt-project.org>


Hi all,

The Qt Company has done some adjustments to the Qt will be offered in the
future. Please check out https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020 .

The change consists of three parts.

One is a change in policy regarding the LTS releases, where the LTS part of
a release is in the future going to be restricted to commercial customers.
All bug fixes will (as agreed on the Qt Contributor Summit) go into dev
first. Backporting bug fixes is something that the Qt Company will take
care of for these LTS branches. We’ve seen over the past that LTS support
is something mainly required by large companies, and should hopefully help
us get some more commercial support for developing Qt further.

The second change is that a Qt Account will be in the future required for
binary packages. Source code will continue to be available as currently.
This will simplify distribution and integration with the Marketplace. In
addition, we want open source users to contribute to Qt or the Qt
ecosystem. Doing so is only possible with a valid Qt Account (Jira, code
review and the forums all require a Qt Account).

The third change is that The Qt Company will in the future also offer a
lower priced product for small businesses. That small business product is
btw not limited to mobile like the one Digia had some years ago, but covers
all of Qt for Device Creation.

None of these changes should affect how Qt is being developed. There won’t
be any changes to Open Governance or the open development model.

Best regards,
Lars

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