Qt Company about a change in the licensing model of the Qt framework, which could have a significant impact on the communities and distributions that use Qt. Starting from version 5.15, LTS branches of Qt will be supported until the next major release is formed, i.e. about six months (updates for LTS branches are released for three years). that such a step will speed up the implementation of new branches and will increase the number of companies using a 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of distributions with long support periods (RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, SUSE) will be forced to either deliver outdated, officially unsupported releases, independently porting bug fixes and vulnerabilities, or constantly update to new significant versions of Qt, which is unlikely, since may lead to unexpected problems in the Qt applications supplied in the distribution. Perhaps the community will jointly organize support for its own LTS branches of Qt, independent of the Qt Company.
Part of the tightening of the licensing policy is mitigated by the fact that the Qt Company has promised to make all fixes through a public repository in which Qt development is carried out. Patches will be added to the dev branch and transferred to branches with current stable releases, which will simplify their extraction for transfer to distributions. The LTS branches to which fixes will be ported by the Qt Company will be limited.
Unfortunately, policy changes regarding Qt are not limited to license changes, and downloading binary builds of Qt starting in February will require registering for an account in the Qt Account service. This step is explained by the desire to simplify the distribution of assemblies and ensure integration with the catalog store . Access to the Jira issue tracking system, review interface and forums will also require a Qt Account. The development and project management model remain .
Source: opennet.ru