The Qt Company Provides A Brief Comment On Open-Source

Yesterday a KDE developer who serves on the board of the KDE Free Qt Foundation commented that The Qt Company is evaluating restricting new releases to paying customers for 12 months. That was said to be under consideration due to COVID19 / coronavirus impacting their finances and needing to boost short-term revenues. The Qt Company has now come out with an incredibly brief statement on the matter.

Obviously many are concerned that The Qt Company could be erecting a wall around new Qt releases with this possible year delay before going out cleanly as open-source. This comes months after The Qt Company already shifted to make Qt LTS releases customer-only, among other steps to boost their commercial business at the beginning of the year.

Following all the speculation and concerns from the statement by KDE's Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer, The Qt Company released this very brief statement:

There have been discussions on various internet forums about the future of Qt open source in the last two days. The contents do not reflect the views or plans of The Qt Company.

The Qt Company is proud to be committed to its customers, open source, and the Qt governance model.

A rather lackluster statement without any reaffirming of their commitment to timely open-source Qt releases or the like. So we'll see where this goes and how it will all play out. While through the KDE Free Qt Foundation there will always be an open-source Qt version at play, having to maintain an open-source fork would be quite a burden to the KDE crew that already has a lot on their plate. Some though within the KDE development community are already calling for a fork in cooperation with other Qt stakeholders and in making no concessions to The Qt Company in their conversations around the Free Qt Foundation.