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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[Setif]

Maybe you missed this part?:

Did I say something else?

[bug77]

I think that their approach is flawed. I agree that they need to cash in, but that's an ugly way to do it.
Usually if you want more people use your paid tiers you add something that's worth buying, you don't take away stuff from the free tier...

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

[JackLilhammers]

Congratulations to the Qt Marketing Dept. Boiling a frog is a difficult scam that requires expert weasel tactics. “Who needs seat belts or LTS anyway?”

look who's come out of the cave. do you have a generator for your posts or you actually take time to write the same thing over and over again?

[ddriver]

No pre-built offline installers sure, although I wouldn't say that I am going to miss those. Especially not since they moved everything into one installer, I really only use the GCC version, so it is kinda pointless to download a binary that contains a multitude of versions just to get one.

On the upside, you can still get pre-built with the online installer, and qt installations are supposed to be portable now, although I haven't tested it yet, so technically you should be able to use the online installer to download whatever you want, and then simply store that as a portable installation and copy it to other systems, so you don't even need to go through the installation step, as long as the installation is portable, that's actually better than the slow and bloated offline installer.

Lastly, building qt yourself is fairly trivial and there are a lot of good reasons to do your custom configured build.

[JackLilhammers]

It could be, I'm not big on legalese
Tbh, users of rolling releases jump on the latest Qt release every time. They did not benefit from LTS support anyway. This will hurt conservative distros, but the silver lining could be they are now pushed towards shipping more recent Qt versions; users win by getting more up to date packages, Qt Company wins by getting more feedback on their changes.
Not a win-win, losing support is always a bummer. But if Qt Company needed to cash in on something, this may be the most harmless way of doing that.

I think that their approach is flawed. I agree that they need to cash in, but that's an ugly way to do it.
Usually if you want more people use your paid tiers you add something that's worth buying, you don't take away stuff from the free tier...

[CommunityMember]

It could be, I'm not big on legalese

"We" will all know the truth sometime after Qt 6.0 ships (and not before), since the wording is quite intentionally part of the spin zone.

Tbh, users of rolling releases jump on the latest Qt release every time. They did not benefit from LTS support anyway.

Well, for minor releases, sure. But just as Qt 4 (last) is still shipped by many distros, Qt 5 (last) will be shipped by many (including rolling) releases long after Qt 6 is available as it is unlikely that there will not be some incompatible change between Qt 5 (last) and QT 6 (first) that some independent projects are not yet ready to embrace. Having done just a very small part of the uplift from Qt 4 to Qt 5 in a larger OSS project I recognize that sometimes it is easy, but there are places where it is not, and testing on multiple Qt versions is not at all trivial.