[Interest] Qt 5.15 pull out of open source?!

[Benjamin TERRIER]

On Thu, 7 Jan 2021 at 16:38, Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io> wrote:

>
>
> In essence the situation for open-source users is just like it was for
> everyone before introducing the long-term supported releases (with Qt 5.6).
>
>
No, it is not.

The issue of open source users is not that LTS are commercial only (well it
is an issue, but that's not what most people are complaining about right
now).
The issue here is that the next version is not a minor release, but a major
release. And the fact that a lot of modules are missing does not help.

In this regard, Qt 5.15 should not be compared to 5.13 or 5.14, but rather
to 4.8.

Qt 5.0.0 was released in December 2012, just after 4.8.4 was released.
Then we had 3 more patch releases of Qt 4 until 4.8.7 was released in May
2015.
So people had more than 2.5 years to switch between Qt 4 and Qt 5, and by
the time 4.8.7 was released Qt 5 was approaching version 5.5
meaning that people could be somewhat confident that Qt 5 had matured
enough so that making the switch would not yield too many bad surprises.

Now Qt 6.0 has been officially released. But truth be told, Qt 6 is not
finished: 20 modules are missing and 15 of them are scheduled for 6.2.
So basically for open source users the support of Qt 5.15 has stopped 9
months before a usable version should be available.

Dropping the LTS for open source users would not have been an issue this
big if you had done it for any other version.
But doing it for 5.15, the last Qt 5 version is the worst timing. If
anything Qt 5.15 should have had an extended support time
to help bridge the gap to Qt 6, regardless of it being an LTS or not, just
like it was done for Qt 4.8.

Regards,

Benjamin
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