Qt Group about changing the license for the Qt Wayland Compositor, Qt Application Manager and Qt PDF components, which, starting with the release of Qt 5.14, will be shipped under the GPLv3 license instead of the LGPLv3. In other words, linking to these components will now require open source programs under licenses compatible with GPLv3, or purchase a commercial license (previously, using the LGPLv3 allowed linking to proprietary code).
Qt Wayland Compositor and Qt Application Manager are mainly in demand when creating solutions for embedded and mobile devices, and Qt PDF was previously only available in the form of test releases. It should be noted that a number of additional modules and platforms are already supplied under GPLv3, including:
- Qt Charts
- Qt CoAP
- Qt Data Visualization
- Qt Device Utilities
- Qt KNX
- Qt Lottie Animation
- Qt MQTT
- Qt Network Authentication
- Qt Quick WebGL
- Qt Virtual Keyboard
- Qt for WebAssembly
Another noteworthy change is options for sending telemetry to Qt Creator. A desire to understand how Qt products are used in order to improve their quality is mentioned as the reason for including telemetry. It is stated that the information is processed in an anonymized form without identifying specific users, but using UUID to anonymously separate user data (the Qt-class QUuid is used for generation). The IP address from which statistics are sent can also potentially be used as an identifier, but in on the processing of private information, it is indicated that the company does not store binding to IP addresses.
The component for sending statistics is included in today's release . The functionality related to telemetry is implemented through the βtelemetryβ plugin, which is activated if the user does not refuse to collect data during installation (during installation, a warning is issued, in which the telemetry sending point is highlighted by default). The plugin is based on a framework developed by the KDE project. Through the "Qt Creator Telemetry" section in the settings, the user can control which data is transferred to the external server. There are five levels of telemetry detail:
- Basic system information (data about versions of Qt and Qt Creator, compiler and QPA plugin);
- Basic statistics on usage (in addition, information about the frequency of launches of Qt Creator and the duration of work in the program is transmitted);
- Detailed system information (screen settings, OpenGL and graphics card data);
- Detailed usage statistics (license information, Qt Quick Designer usage, locale, build system, use of different Qt Creator modes);
- Disable data collection.
In the settings, you can also selectively control the inclusion of each statistics parameter and view the resulting JSON document sent to an external server. In the current release, the data collection mode is disabled by default, but in the future it is planned to activate the mode of detailed usage statistics. Data is transmitted over an encrypted communication channel. The server handler runs in the Amazon cloud (the statistics store is hosted on the same backend as the online installer).
Additionally, it can be noted first beta version of Qt 5.14. The release is expected on November 26th. The release of Qt 5.14 is notable for including preliminary support for some scheduled for . For example, a preliminary implementation of the new Qt Quick with 3D support has been added. The new scene rendering API will allow you to run Qt Quick based applications on top of Vulkan, Metal or Direct3D 11 (without being hardwired to OpenGL), will allow you to use QML to define 3D elements in the interface without using the UIP format, and will also solve problems such as large the overhead of integrating QML with content from Qt 3D, and the inability to synchronize animations and frame-level transformations between 2D and 3D.
Source: opennet.ru