Qt LTS Releases To Be Restricted To Commercial Customers, Other Commercial Changes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Qt LTS Releases To Be Restricted To Commercial Customers, Other Commercial Changes

In ruffling feathers of open-source Qt fans, The Qt Company announced a series of changes today to help foster their commercial business...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qt-Going-More-Commercial

[treba]

Urgh, I hope this will not impact security on Linux too hard. Does the license allow e.g. the kde project to distribute their own LTS version with backported fixes, so all distributions can pull from it?

These are moments when I'm very happy that we have GTK.

[cl333r]

You can't get a whole company to live off of an open source toolkit, no matter what they do they'll have to shrink.

[boxie]

It's not the worst idea I guess. They gotta make money to pay the bills somehow.

But I do wonder that if they are doing this, how much life is left in the company...

[slacka]

I've worked with a 1/2 dozen toolkits over my life. Qt is a absolute joy to work with.

If this keeps them in the game, I welcome this move. Programmers are NOT cheap, and losing Qt would be a massive blow to the open source community.

[zxy_thf]

Urgh, I hope this will not impact security on Linux too hard. Does the license allow e.g. the kde project to distribute their own LTS version with backported fixes, so all distributions can pull from it?

These are moments when I'm very happy that we have GTK.

I don't see there is any license issue ther, if KDE did the backporting job by themselfs, and if you're using a fast-moving linux (Arch, Fedora, Clear, etc) this should also have little impact to you.

However I think this is good news for Qt users; the company behind Qt finally finds one more way to survive and thrive.

[Guest]

Urgh, I hope this will not impact security on Linux too hard. Does the license allow e.g. the kde project to distribute their own LTS version with backported fixes, so all distributions can pull from it?

These are moments when I'm very happy that we have GTK.

Really? The GTK are buggy-designed gui libs.

[Danny3]

So, what does this mean for KDE Plama and other open source programs that use Qt ?

[Guest]

Linux need a new, completely free (as in freedom) gui libs. Both the Qt libs and the Gtk+/- libs aren't. Maybe Linux (not the kernel) needs a full reboot. The gtk1 gui libs are the only good for a fork.

[FireBurn]

This will only effect LTS distros, everyone else will be running the a new enough Qt. The LTS distros will be more than able to backport fixes themselves, though I'm wondering if the branches will still be available, just not the binaries