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

[starshipeleven]

They aren't GUI libs though.

*yet

at this point it is only a matter of time before they add that to systemd

[Guest]

Look on the bright side, it could be worse and Larry Ellison bought out the Qt Company.

Edit: More info here, perhaps Michael could update the article for a fuller explanation....

I read:
We want open-source users to help improve Qt in one form or another, be that through bug reports, forums, code reviews, or similar.
What a genious people.

[tildearrow]

-144Hz-free thread-

As of now I will not let that disaster of a refresh rate troll post here! It will get on my nerves and the thread will explode.

This is just the perfect opportunity for him to insult Qt to the utmost... :<

[moilami]

Bad start for a new year. The worst news so far. This kind of way is the same as the BSD way.

Good thing though is that now I can completely forget QT and KDE, sadly.

[tildearrow]

We already have GTK+3,

...but freaking CSD.

FLTK,

This toolkit is horrible! It still uses the ancient bezeled design that dates from the '90's, and does not even support animations or stuff like that.
Heck, even the website still uses HTML4 and they use images for the corners!

[adomas]

This post somehow made me sad.

But as I understand open source that uses Qt is unaffected, right? KDE Plasma and KDE Apps will have same availability of bug-fixes and security-fixes, just no longer with LTS?

I wonder what other options than Qt there could be. Is GTK+ a good choice? As I hear a lot and often it's very resource hungry and has messy base code.

[jKicker]

It is understandable from perspective that you need money to employ people. Making a product from only a library? Making a company and employing people? Really tough.
I hope they thought it through. In my view, indie / startup should get more focus so $499/year makes me happy. However, unclear limitations is what scares everyone:

This price includes the use of the full Qt for Device Creation product, but not any distribution licenses – these need to be agreed separately

What?
So you need to contact them in advance immediately? Then provide I don't know what so they could control you, your income, your number of employees? What?
Why cannot there be a clear simple model that anyone could easily pay for? And why their main blog post is so detached from emotions while they work in opensource with community?

I really get the other part, I truly do as I've made a startup and really, just ensuring money for people salaries is tough.

But in my view they want everyone using and developing with Qt and then offer few good paid plans because sooner or later people will want some support of features, i.e. look at Ionic plans (yet another web framework).
Funnily in my last two companies, one smaller and one a huge international (US based) company that had 30k employees, neither wanted to use Qt for that reason as they were scared of locked in behavior. US company went with EFL and custom JS bindings, like crazy stuff, nightmare to use and maintain, just to not use Qt.

[Nth_man]

This post somehow made me sad.

But as I understand open source that uses Qt is unaffected, right? KDE Plasma and KDE Apps will have same availability of bug-fixes and security-fixes, just no longer with LTS?

As someone previously wrote: "This will only affect LTS distros, everyone else will be running the a new enough Qt. The LTS distros will be more than able to backport fixes themselves."

[CommunityMember]

I wonder what other options than Qt there could be.

There are few alternatives with the extensive cross platform support that Qt provides for both the GUI and extensive functional abstractions. For some projects that is a critical factor, and for others not so much.

[Britoid]

...but freaking CSD.



This toolkit is horrible! It still uses the ancient bezeled design that dates from the '90's, and does not even support animations or stuff like that.
Heck, even the website still uses HTML4 and they use images for the corners!

Qt supports them too....