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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 The problem is that these releases are in effect no longer maintained.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."
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 07 2021, @04:07PM
I started using Qt in 2006, and the one thing that has been "superior" about it as compared to all other libraries I have used before and since is its ubiquity and continuing development/support. This move with 5.15.3 certainly smells of Richard - and I expect as much given their return to a "for profit, licensed" organization - but it doesn't change the utility / power of 5.15.2 at all, and frankly starting with around 5.5.1 the 5 generation was better than anything else I have evaluated, and back in 2006 4.whatever they were at when I started then was already better than available alternatives.
During the 4-5 transition, there were some "new" technologies like JSON that were getting support in 5 but not 4 and stuff like that drove my eventual migration to 5 (although, porting the 5 JSON handling code back into 4 wasn't all that hard to do...) I imagine there will be "new shiny" stuff that gets worked into 6 that 5 lacks, but whatever it is, I'm not missing it yet... well... except for 64 bit QString and QByteArray length support... I'm sure there will be more in the future.
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