Your decision is not a reason to contribute more. It is going to hurt the ecosystem because it makes it harder to get new developers and users.
In some of my previous companies, we had a long release cycle so as a Linux developer I could justify my paid time spent on upstreaming a fix to get it included into the binary offline installers for all platforms in about a month. The new policy cross-off this reason to submit fixes. You already made life harder by licensing Qt under GPL v3. Of course, it has pros and cons, but let's jump to the consequence: we have Sailfish OS out of the boat. The OS could have a modern Qt and we actually could have people working on the upstream QtDeclarative, Qt Quick Controls 2 and other modules in the paid time, but. The OS developers have complex agreements with a number of important business partners and for some of them, it is unacceptable to follow some of the tivoization-related GPL v3 clauses. It is hard to explain to managers the profit from a new version or collaboration with the Qt community. (From a business PoV) it makes very little sense to pay for some abstract "technical prettiness" as long as Qt 5.6 gives you the money. On the professional side, I suddenly understand how much I'm depending on Qt. I spent my paid and spare time to make the world and the Qt world better, but now I'm sad and disappointed. The world is changing so fast. Years ago I taught students to the light side with C++, Qt, and open source. I can't imagine asking dozens of students to register and get Qt Account. Nowadays and with this step, I see even fewer reasons to learn C++ and Qt. I respect and appreciate the work of all Qt developers. Thank you all for the amazing technology. Long live Qt! I hope we won't have to fork. On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 5:35 PM Lars Knoll <lars.kn...@qt.io> wrote: > > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Development mailing list > Development@qt-project.org > https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/development _______________________________________________ Development mailing list Development@qt-project.org https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/development
