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from the shooting-yourself-in-the-foot dept.
Open-source contributors say they'll pull out of Qt as LTS release goes commercial-only:
The Qt Company has followed up on its plan to make long-term support releases commercial-only by closing the source for 5.15 today, earning protests from open-source contributors who say that the 6.0 release, which remains open, is not yet usable.
[...] Yesterday senior VP Tuukka Turunen posted: "With Qt 6.0.0 released and the first patch release (Qt 6.0.1) coming soon, it is time to enter the commercial-only LTS phase for Qt 5.15 LTS. All the existing 5.15 branches remain publicly visible, but they are closed for new commits (and cherry-picks)... closing happens tomorrow, 5th January 2021.
"After this the cherry-picks go to another repository that will be available only for the commercial license holders... first commercial-only Qt 5.15.3 LTS patch release is planned to be released in February."
[...] The problem is that these releases are in effect no longer maintained. If there is a security issue, or a fix needed to support some change in one of the target operating systems, open-source users will not get that fix other than in the not-ready version 6.0.
Open-source contributor Thiago Macieira, an Intel software architect, said of the decision: "That means I will not be participating in the development of those fixes, commenting on what's appropriate or not, reviewing backports, or bug reports."
"Tend to agree," said Konstantin Ritt, another developer. "If there is a decision to close 5.15 sources, there'll be no more work from external/unpaid contributors."
Turunen responded that: "This is well understandable and expected. The Qt Company is prepared to handle the Qt 5.15 LTS phase work."
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(Score: 2) by DECbot on Thursday January 07 2021, @08:03AM (1 child)
I was planning to install plasma on a new laptop this weekend and then they pull this stunt. Dick moves like this is what prevents open source from ever getting wide stream adoption. I'm sure there's plenty of examples, but this reminds me of OSS which forced ALSA upon us. It makes me curious about Apple's plans for cups.
Anyway, there's been rumors that Trolltech would do this very thing for a long time, so the KDE dev community shouldn't be caught off guard. Actually, the alarm is more about the sudden shift to 6 and outrage that 6 isn't ready for production rather than the current LTS version going closed source only. This move is going to make the KDE devs succumb to their rolling releases or fork--neither of which sounds popular to the KDE devs.
And KDE was just starting to get really exciting with their last several releases. Should I stay on XFCE, rock Mate, or risk it all and install plasma? This sucks. Maybe ask those console jockeys were right. The DE is a passing fad and the command line is the only right way. But what's the best shell? Bash? Dash? zsh? tsh? Emacs? There's a flash plugin for emacs, right?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 07 2021, @12:02PM
The shift to 5 was less than smooth, too. Back around 2013 timeframe I was still building new systems in 4 because 5 just wasn't "there" yet. I think in late 2013 I finally made the switch to 5 because I was moving into something that was simple enough to not be bitten by all the "lack of" in 5.
Now Quick vs Widgets: Quick still seems to have plenty of lack to it, as compared to the Widgets development experience. Quick clearly has a bit more power, but that power comes at a high cost.
John Galt is a selfish crybaby [huffpost.com].