Qt LTS Releases To Be Restricted To Commercial Customers, Other Commercial Changes

In ruffling feathers of open-source Qt fans, The Qt Company announced a series of changes today to help foster their commercial business.

Moving forward, Qt Long-Term Support (LTS) releases will be restricted to commercial customers. All bug fixes will go into the public Qt development tree but the back-porting of fixes to Qt LTS branches will be restricted now to commercial customers. The Qt Company is hoping this move will make more companies become commercial customers in order to gain LTS access.

Additionally, The Qt Company will now require Qt Accounts for downloading binary packages. This helps The Qt Company in tracking users and they say to "simplify distribution and integration with the [Qt] Marketplace." Thankfully most Linux users get Qt via their distribution package management systems.

The Qt Company will also be introducing a new lower-priced tier for Qt commercial that is aimed at small businesses.

More details in this mailing list post. So far The Qt Company is getting widely slammed by these changes over requiring registration for downloading Qt and that Qt LTS is going commercial only.