Qt 6.5 LTS Shifts To Its Commercial-Only Phase

It's already that time of the Qt 6.5 long-term support (LTS) cycle where The Qt Company has shifted it over to being focused on access only to their commercial customers.

Now that Qt 6.6 has been released, Qt 6.5 LTS is going commercial-only and the existing publicly available Qt 6.5 Git branches will be closed for new commits.

Release manager Tarja Sundqvist at The Qt Company wrote in this morning's announcement:

"With Qt 6.6.0 released and the first patch release (Qt 6.6.1) coming at November, it is time to enter the commercial-only LTS phase for Qt 6.5 LTS. All existing 6.5 branches remain publicly visible, but they are closed for new commits and cherry-picks. The exception is the Qt WebEngine, which has a 3rd party LGPL dependency.

Closing happens today, 18th of October 2023. After this, the cherry-picks go to another repository that will be available only for the commercial license holders.

The first commercial-only Qt 6.5.4 LTS patch release is planned to be released at the end of November.

The external module maintainers will have access to the Qt 6.5 commercial-only repositories."

If they hold their tradition like with the Qt 5.15 LTS series, they will make public new point releases as open-source a year later after each point release has first been pushed to their paying customers for that period.