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Qt commercial-only LTS phase starts
- est31 6y agoIt doesn't seem to be THAT bad as LTS phases were introduced in the first place only very recently. See: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/kqi1v8/qt_515_commercialonly_lts_phase_starts_closing/gi4o0ua/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/kqi1v8/qt_515_commer... Also, some distros haven't even updated to the latest FLOSS version of the LTS release, so it seems to not be that important to the maintainers.
- Rochus 6y agoRight. Never saw a benefit in switching to the most recent version. Still very satisfied with Qt 4.8 and 5.4. Apparently they closed the LTS branch for community contributions which is reasonable because otherwise the community would contribute to a version which would only be accessible to other community members a year later.
- jcelerier 6y ago> Right. Never saw a benefit in switching to the most recent version. Still very satisfied with Qt 4.8 and 5.4. if you have any users with a hidpi screen it makes a huge difference to them
- Rochus 6y agoI have indeed; macOS is no issue; Windows needs a couple of ifdefs, no big deal.
- jcelerier 6y agothere are plenty of hidpi bugs that were only fixed in 5.12 ... 5.15 though. Even 5.12 is still a big mess with e.g. 125% scaling on windows - text will scale but not images, things like that
- nly 6y agoAll the Qt Company has accomplished here is to put another nail in the fast, native cross-platform and desktop software coffin, hinder Qt 6 adoption, and push more developers to Electron. The FOSS world will take Qt 5.15.2 as the last official version and maintain distro compatibility patches. The last Qt 4 release, Qt 4.8.7 released in May 2015, is still available in Arch AUR with 32 distro revisions and a dozen community patches. They're playing with fire gambling that the FOSS community ultimately won't fix bugs in Qt 5 faster than they do (once they switch all their energies to Qt 6)
- dagmx 6y agoThis seems overly dramatic. The concept of LTS was relatively new. Qt users have gone ages without LTS. Nothing here prevents you from using older Qt versions where needed. You're not being stopped from using newer Qt versions, just that LT support is now gated behind commercial licensing. Can you expound on exactly what about this is so inflammatory to you?
- nly 6y agoThe LTS aspect is all marketing misdirection. All Qt 5 versions are now LTS, including the latest. This means FOSS releases from the Qt Company are effectively subject to a 1 year delay, and as such they are now being as hostile to the FOSS as they can be under their legal commitments. Whatever they say, I wouldn't bank on any further public updates to Qt 5.12 or 5.9 either.
- CarVac 6y agoWhat do you mean subject to a 1 year delay? Qt 6 is available right now.
- nly 6y agoQt 6 is less than half the size of Qt 5 in terms of modules/size. I'd also consider it alpha quality software at this point. I don't see KDE adopting it Qt 6 anytime soon given the tone. Qt have already approached KDE to try and renegotiate their agreement. It's likely that 6.1 will see 6.0 become LTS, and we will never see a FOSS stable branch again. For hobbiest developers, small enterprises, FOSS developers and LTS desktops this is pretty disastrous
- paulryanrogers 6y agoThere is always CopperSpice
- jwitthuhn 6y agoDoes anyone know how this is compliant with the QT Company's agreement with the KDE Free Qt Foundation? I was under the impression the Qt company was legally obligated to release all updates under the LGPL, and failure to do so would result in the latest release of Qt being relicensed to BSD. Specifically, section 3.2 in this agreement. https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreement_2015.pdf https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreeme... I understand they have 12 months from now until that clause kicks in, but based on their announcements it looks like the Qt company has no intention of ever releasing these 5.13 updates as open-source.
- detaro 6y agoThey probably don't want to advertise that, because it might persuade people to wait instead of pay. Hopefully they'll release the patches quietly after a year instead of trying to lawyer out of it (which I'd expect to be unlikely, but who knows)
- dathinab 6y agoFixes having a delay of multiple month is enough for many companies relaying on Qt to pay for LTS ;=)
- beowulfey 6y agoAs someone who is relatively new to coding but has a small Qt project, can someone explain what LTS is? I’m thinking it means you get security updates but don’t have to change api versions that might break your app? For example, my app compiles with Qt 6 and I wrote it as such. But I’m guessing when 6.1 comes around, there may be a chance that something will break. I guess I’m wondering if bigger projects avoid trying to update because it makes for complicated debugging if something does need to be changed, or if maybe something else contributes to it.
- dathinab 6y agoLTS = Long Term Support It means that a specific qt version will get support for a "long" time. Support can mean direct customer support but it also can mean that e.g. security & bug fixes get back-ported (if someone with LTS support runs into them). It also can mean that proprietary extensions e.g. payments systems support the version of the software longer. The reason why to use LTS is because you don't want frequently port your software a newer major version of the library/framework does not only cost you but in case you highly customized the library/framework or depend on a lot of very specific behaviour might go from costly to monetary unfeasible. (I mean consider you havily depend on a feature dropped in the new major version.) As such if you sell software/hardware with software and you need to support it long enough because your customer expects it it always is a good idea to see if there is a LTS version which has as long or longer support then you need to provide. Oh and due to longer usage LTS versions tends become less and less buggy over time as bugs are fixed but (view) new bugs are introduced as no new features are added and not parts are rewritten (beside bug fixes).
- ialsohavenoname 6y agoDoes anybody know how KDE is (planning on) dealing with these changes to QT?
- gramakri 6y agoPlease change title from QT to Qt (I am an ex-Qt developer).
- dang 6y agoOk, done.