The Qt Company about the change in the licensing model of the Qt framework, which may have a significant impact on the communities and distributions using Qt. Starting from version 5.15, the LTS branch of Qt will be supported until the next major release is formed, i.e., for about six months (updates for LTS branches are released for three years). , that such a step will speed up the adoption of new branches and increase the number of companies using the commercial license for Qt, which costs $5508 per year per developer (for startups and small businesses — $499 per year).
Developers of distributions with long support cycles (RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, SUSE) will be forced either to ship outdated officially unsupported releases, porting bug fixes and vulnerabilities themselves, or to constantly update to new major versions of Qt, which is unlikely as it may lead to unforeseen problems in the provided Qt applications within the distribution. It is possible that the community will organize support for its own LTS branches of Qt, independent of the Qt Company.
Partially, the tightening of the licensing policy is mitigated by the fact that Qt Company has promised to conduct all fixes through a public repository where the development of Qt takes place. Patches will be added to the dev branch and moved to branches with stable releases, which will simplify their extraction for inclusion in distributions. The LTS branches to which fixes will be ported by Qt Company will be limited.
Unfortunately, the policy changes regarding Qt are not limited to the licensing switch, and starting from February, registration for a Qt Account will be required to download binary builds of Qt. This step is explained by the desire to simplify the distribution of builds and ensure integration with the store directory . Access to the Jira bug tracking system, the review interface, and forums will also require a Qt Account. The development and project management model remain .
Source: opennet.ru
