Commercial-Only Qt 5.15.3 LTS Now Released As Open-Source

One year ago this week Qt 5.15.3 LTS was released with 200+ bug fixes for this toolkit but that long-term support release was made commercial-only. Today The Qt Company has made available an open-source release of the Qt 5.15.3 changes.

Under The Qt Company's plans to move Qt LTS point releases later on to be for commercial customers only, Qt 5.15.3 LTS kicked off that effort to boost their sales. Unfortunately, that left open-source Linux desktop users in the dark for those that aren't Qt commercial customers and at a time when the Qt6 support last year had a lot to be desired with numerous modules not ported over at the time and other issues.

Now as part of the KDE Free Qt Foundation, one day less than one year since Qt 5.15.3 LTS was released to commercial customers, The Qt Company has published a freely-available open-source version of that point release.

The open-source Qt 5.15.3 release was announced today with source packages being available for download and a new "v5.15.3-lts-lgpl" Git branch. That Git tag was made back in November but only pushed out publicly and announced today.

Qt 5.15.8 LTS meanwhile is their latest commercial-only release, so it looks like we'll be waiting quite a while longer before the newer open-source point releases are made available - v5.15.8 will presumably be open-source now next January.