New Qt Releases Might Now Be Restricted To Paying Customers For 12 Months

[angrypie]

It's their product, they can do whatever they want with it, why are you all so entitled brats? KDE will cope with this just fine.

"Yes, master, lock me into your proprietary ways!"

[Xaero_Vincent]

Sounds like a fork of Qt might be in order? Although I'm a GNOME user, KDE devs shouldn't be held hostage to the QT company. It's not fair.

[royce]

QT have fucked up this time.

[Naquatis]

Take me ages to learn all the bits and pieces of QT. But if it is getting streamed upward every 12 month it maybe getting released more robust?

[CommunityMember]

The obvious result will be a community fork of Qt and everything moving to that.

A community fork could happen, but development would possibly stagnate and diverge from the commercial product (which might be fine for some, but not so good for others). A complex multi-platform UI toolkit is very hard (although not impossible) to achieve a strong community to fully support. From the contributions to the existing Qt project a very large percentage would seem to be from inside the Qt Company and replacing that talent would likely be difficult. Reality bites.

[angrypie]

Sounds like a fork of Qt might be in order? Although I'm a GNOME user, KDE devs shouldn't be held hostage to the QT company. It's not fair.

Not enough staff for a fork, according to KDE themselves:

The issue is for KDE is that we can't prepare ourselves. We can't fork Qt, because we lack the manpower to safely do so currently.

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006099.html

[MadeUpName]

I will never forget the line on Slashdot just shortly after the company behind ssh tried playing this game. "If you paid $2000 for your copy of ssh you have a massive security problem. I you got it for free you are fine". The company behind ssh was dead shortly after. The KDE guys aren't stupid like many are suggesting. They knew this was possible from the beginning and got contracts to allow them to fork if (at the time Troll Tech) got stupid. There is no way this ends well for Qt.

[Vistaus]

so kde will go gtk?

Or back to Qt 3, which is still maintained and being expanded by the Trinity devs as TQt 3.

[uxmkt]

Feels like the year 2000 all over again. Fool community once, shame on Qt; fool community twice, shame on the community.

[ALRBP]

Qt
1995-2020
"Killed by COVID-19 (and bad governance)"
Between the graves of XFree86 and OpenOffice.

Long live FreeQt/QtFree/LibreQt/QtLibre/Kt or any name the community will pick for the fork.