Qt commercial-only LTS phase starts
lists.qt-project.org
lists.qt-project.org
The FOSS world will take Qt 5.15.2 as the last official version and maintain distro compatibility patches. The last Qt 4 release, Qt 4.8.7 released in May 2015, is still available in Arch AUR with 32 distro revisions and a dozen community patches.
They're playing with fire gambling that the FOSS community ultimately won't fix bugs in Qt 5 faster than they do (once they switch all their energies to Qt 6)
The concept of LTS was relatively new. Qt users have gone ages without LTS. Nothing here prevents you from using older Qt versions where needed.
You're not being stopped from using newer Qt versions, just that LT support is now gated behind commercial licensing.
Can you expound on exactly what about this is so inflammatory to you?
This means FOSS releases from the Qt Company are effectively subject to a 1 year delay, and as such they are now being as hostile to the FOSS as they can be under their legal commitments.
Whatever they say, I wouldn't bank on any further public updates to Qt 5.12 or 5.9 either.
Qt 6 is available right now.
I don't see KDE adopting it Qt 6 anytime soon given the tone. Qt have already approached KDE to try and renegotiate their agreement.
It's likely that 6.1 will see 6.0 become LTS, and we will never see a FOSS stable branch again. For hobbiest developers, small enterprises, FOSS developers and LTS desktops this is pretty disastrous
Edit: yes I know Qt 6 is only a partial release. I'm asking the poster to provide sources for their claims so they're not being editorialized to seem sinister.
Personally, I can't migrate to Qt 6 because it lacks the location module.
There's a big difference between: - modules not ported yet - modules ported and being held behind a commercial license where they weren't before.
One is more nefarious than the other, but by omitting context, the initial poster is alluding to the more sinister option based on the dramatic context of their posts.
> Starting with Qt 5.15, long term support (LTS) will only be available to commercial customers. This means open-source users will receive patch-level releases of 5.15 until the next minor release will become available. This means that we will handle Qt 5.15 in the same way as e.g. 5.13 or 5.14 for open source users.
I'd be better off reporting a bug on GitHub to some FOSS fork, because at least when it's fixed I can benefit from it immediately. Likewise any contributions I made would be welcome (Qt Company are now closing patch contributions)
They're already doing the work of cherry picking and testing LTS. They're saving themselves a git merge and a git push because they falsely believe this will drive further sales.
Maybe it will, but they're still throwing the FOSS community using Qt 5 under the bus.
It would have been better to go back to GPL, and had just had timely FOSS releases, since a small business license for the library is only $500/year.
Likewise, 6.2 will be LTS but it's the support that is gated, not the release.
Or is this not the case?
Why would they make 6.2.0 a public FOSS release and then withhold 6.2.1 for a year? And even if they did, would you want to use a .0 release on your project?
No, it seems likely to me that 6.2 will effectively be closed source when it's announced, and open source releases will follow after a year.
Source?
They have to make these changes public under their agreement with the KDE foundation after no longer than 1 year. If it wasn't for that agreement Qt 5 would be abandonware from a FOSS perspective, much like Qt 4
Time will show. Don't forget that there are many community contributors. As far as I've understood the LTS branch is closed for community contributions which makes sense since it would not be desireable to wait one year until these contributions would be accessible to other FOSS users; but this only applies to the LTS branch; the other branches are not affected.
> Qt 5 would be abandonware from a FOSS perspective, much like Qt 4
Well, I still have many active projects using Qt 4.4, 4.8 and 5.4; didn't see any added value in upgrading. Maybe people using QML can profit of more recent versions, but I'm using the C++ API only with work mostly done by Trolltech and Nokia.
Per Qt [1] the only major difference is that open source users only get patch updates for a specific version till the next minor update is out. Only commercial users keep getting patch updates to older minor versions.
No where can I find mention of a year delay.
Qt company would like to pretend that is forever (and thus doesn't mention it), but actually the community contract (which exists to prevent Qt company from ever keeping parts of core Qt closed) forces them to release the patches after one year, because withholding any patches to core Qt for more than a year triggers a safeguard clause in that contract that forces relicensing of Qt.
FWIW, your tone does not feel appropriate, especially when you suggest "conspiracy theories".
Qt has huge market share in embedded apps, where Electron is a non-starter.
I'd love to see more open-source alternatives to Qt in the embedded systems GUI space, but it's going to be a long time before anything reaches similar levels of maturity and optimization.
The way I see it you either pay for the library through money or by constantly moving forward with your APIs and doing updates to work with the latest version. If you are anchored to an old version and not paying, you are deadweight. While I'm not clear on the details of Qt's plan, but in the JDK space it makes perfect sense where you have a large contingent of vocal non-contributing that holds back large libraries for updating which slows the evolution of the platform.
from what I could see corporations just buy LTS contracts to be able to ask for bugfixes if the need arises - I've seen products where Qt 5.12.2/3 was used even when the latest was 5.12.8
Qt's track record on user facing bugs just isn't good enough
Or Flutter, if cross-platform desktop becomes first class compared to mobile.
There's also Haxe. The language is great (inspired by AS3) but last time I tried it there were too many moving pieces (eg: OpenFL depending on Lime and both moving at different pacing). That was some years ago though. Anyone is using it for desktop gui?
I have always preferred wxWidgets.
People's aversion to well designed C style macros is just overreacting IMO.
I was under the impression the Qt company was legally obligated to release all updates under the LGPL, and failure to do so would result in the latest release of Qt being relicensed to BSD.
Specifically, section 3.2 in this agreement. https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreeme...
I understand they have 12 months from now until that clause kicks in, but based on their announcements it looks like the Qt company has no intention of ever releasing these 5.13 updates as open-source.
For example, my app compiles with Qt 6 and I wrote it as such. But I’m guessing when 6.1 comes around, there may be a chance that something will break.
I guess I’m wondering if bigger projects avoid trying to update because it makes for complicated debugging if something does need to be changed, or if maybe something else contributes to it.
It means that a specific qt version will get support for a "long" time. Support can mean direct customer support but it also can mean that e.g. security & bug fixes get back-ported (if someone with LTS support runs into them). It also can mean that proprietary extensions e.g. payments systems support the version of the software longer.
The reason why to use LTS is because you don't want frequently port your software a newer major version of the library/framework does not only cost you but in case you highly customized the library/framework or depend on a lot of very specific behaviour might go from costly to monetary unfeasible. (I mean consider you havily depend on a feature dropped in the new major version.)
As such if you sell software/hardware with software and you need to support it long enough because your customer expects it it always is a good idea to see if there is a LTS version which has as long or longer support then you need to provide.
Oh and due to longer usage LTS versions tends become less and less buggy over time as bugs are fixed but (view) new bugs are introduced as no new features are added and not parts are rewritten (beside bug fixes).
Also, some distros haven't even updated to the latest FLOSS version of the LTS release, so it seems to not be that important to the maintainers.
Apparently they closed the LTS branch for community contributions which is reasonable because otherwise the community would contribute to a version which would only be accessible to other community members a year later.
if you have any users with a hidpi screen it makes a huge difference to them