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Open-Source Contributors Say They'll Pull Out of Qt as LTS Release Goes Commercial-Only

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 07 2021, @01:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the shooting-yourself-in-the-foot dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

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 The problem is that these releases are in effect no longer maintained.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."

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2021, @12:26AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2021, @12:26AM (#1096765)

    Trolltech is simply not subject to copyright restrictions on their own copyrighted works so the license as a whole is legally irrelevant to what they do.

    Nonsense. If you grant a license and promise source will be available, and companies make plans based on your assertion, you absolutely have to keep up your end of the bargain. Companies using Qt and contributors who contributed code under the terms of the license agreement would all have grounds to sue to enforce the license to get the GPL source code, or else be awarded monetary damages.