Qt 5.15 Released With Graphics Improvements, Preparations Ahead Of Qt 6

[Setif]

Maybe you missed this part?:

Did I say something else?

[JackLilhammers]

Sure, that's how it's usually done. But then there'd be some functionality the users of the free version don't get. Imho, no patches past a certain point is less harmful. But then there's the valid point CommunityMember raised.
What can I say, ideally Qt Company would be swimming in $$$ and wouldn't do this at all. Since that's seemingly not the case, there's little we can do, but wait and see how it plays out. Qt's past has always been rocky, yet Qt is still with us. Have a little faith

I think that the harm depends largely on the use case. From distributions standpoint the change I don't think they really care as they were usually shipping the last version available.
It's quite harmful for application developers though, because they'll likely want to use a stable version instead of upgrading every 6 months.
However I wonder if they should release the lts patches after 12 months as part of the agreement with the kde foundation.

QtCo definitely makes money, but their business model does not seem to work very well. (And they should not make the community pay for this)
I have no doubt Qt is here to stay, I just hope the current QtCo management isn't

[ddriver]

ideally Qt Company would be swimming in $$$ and wouldn't do this at all

Oh why, sure, because companies that are making tons of money never exhibit any greed. They are humble and modest and always seek to offer the end user a better deal for his money.

Companies with excess of money heavily invest it into more ways in which to rip off the consumer. Also, amazingly, the average developer pay at such giants is actually lower than far smaller revenue companies. People think digia is bad now (which it is), but boy oh boy, you just wait and see how much worse they are gonna get if they actually manage to get wildly profitable.

[carewolf]

But that does not explain why there is qtwebkit and gtkwebkit. Why don't they use one of the two libs and maintain their own fork?

After the official Qt dropped QtWebKit, the new QtWebKit (5.212) is actually based on gtkwebkit (1.212), but with a different backend integration.

[DanL]

Did I say something else?

Well, open source users still get some of the benefits of LTS, and the patches should be available even if standalone installers aren't.