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    One year wait for release of new Qt versions?

    https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...t-New-Releases


    With an apparent blame on the novel coronavirus, The Qt Company is said to be considering restricting new Qt releases to paying customers for a period of twelve months in an effort to boost their near-term finances.

    KDE and the open-source Qt folks have been in discussions with The Qt Company especially with the restrictions announced back in January by The Qt Company that LTS point releases might only be available to commercial customers, Qt Accounts being needed for binary package downloads, etc.

    But the most surprising new information made public today by KDE's Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer is that The Qt Company is considering making new releases paid-customer-only for the first twelve months.

    Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer wrote, "But last week, the company suddenly informed both the KDE e.V. board and the KDE Free QT Foundation that the economic outlook caused by the Corona virus puts more pressure on them to increase short-term revenue. As a result, they are thinking about restricting ALL Qt releases to paid license holders for the first 12 months. They are aware that this would mean the end of contributions via Open Governance in practice."

    Olaf went on to add, "We hope The Qt Company will reconsider. However, this threat to the Open Source community needs to be anticipated, so that the Qt and KDE communities can prepare themselves. The Qt Company says that they are willing to reconsider the approach only if we offer them concessions in other areas. I am reminded, however, of the situation half a year ago. We had discussed an approach for contract updates, which they suddenly threw away by restricting LTS releases of Qt instead."

    Thus moving ahead there is the possibility of a ~12 month delay for new releases being available as open-source but The Qt Company doesn't appear to have firmly decided on this direction yet.
    The agreement the KDE Foundation has with the Qt Company is here, and the company appears to be relying on the 12 month limit clause:
    The most recent agreement covers all releases of all Qt versions for the following platforms:
    • Core Platforms: X11 (i.e. Desktop Linux) and Android – support cannot be dropped.
    • Additional Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Phone, Apple MacOS and Apple iOS – as long as they are supported at all by The Qt Company.
    • The Foundation has the right to update to supported successor platforms (e.g. from X11 to Wayland) without additional negotiations with The Qt Company.



    The following license terms are required:
    • All parts of Qt are available under the GPLv3 or under a compatible license. Most parts are also available under the LGPLv3 and under the GPLv2.
    • The core libraries of Qt (Essentials) and all existing LGPL-licensed Qt add-ons must continue to be available under the LGPLv3.
    • GPLv2-compatibility must kept for all existing GPLv2-licensed Qt code and for the core part of Qt (Essentials) and for the Qt applications. Future versions of the GPL are supported “if approved by the KDE Free Qt Foundation”.
    • Applications included in Qt (e.g. Qt Creator) must be licensed under GPLv2 and GPLv3. Two GPL exceptions clarify:
      1. generated code is not license-restricted, and
      2. 2. bridges to third party applications are still possible.

    • New add-ons for Qt must use GPLv3 and may optionally also offer GPLv2 and/or LGPLv3. The stricter rules above continue to apply if existing functionality is replaced by new modules.

    If these license terms are not yet present at the time of the Qt release, then they must be applied within a timeframe of not more than 12 months.

    KDE Plasma may be at 5.18 longer than folks anticipated. For those who are not familiar: paying for a Qt commercial license allows a developer to release binaries of an application WITHOUT having to release the source code for those binaries. The Open Source license of Qt requires the developer to make available to everyone who receives the binary the source code that was compiled to produce that binary.

    A developer cannot patch or extend the functionality of a binary without access to the source for that binary, and doing so without permission of the copyright holder is a violation of the DMCA. This inhibits improvements and reliability of closed source Qt based application and such applications, if they fail to garner the revenue the developer anticipated, falls by the wayside. Applications made under the Open Source Qt License allows anyone to patch, modify, extend, improve or what ever, without the original developers permission, because GPL gives them that right. Also, besides being a beautiful GUI framework, the power of Qt is write once, compile anywhere (i.e., Linux, Windows, Mac or Android) and the KDE Foundation's agreement requires the Qt Company to maintain that capability.

    In the long run the KDE Plasma desktop will not be hurt. Being a year behind the front line release will just be another factor in its development cycle. But, if Qt goes out of business or can't/won't execute an annual release of the Open Source version then the KDE Foundation can immediately release the latest version released by Qt, and do so under the BSD or other licenses it chooses.
    "A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
    – John F. Kennedy, February 26, 1962.

    #2
    Thank you.

    Comment


      #3
      KDE has the threat of forking Qt, which seems to be tempering things. If there is enough interest in this, manpower-wise, it could happen. Especially now with many people ostensibly sitting idle due to social distancing.

      Another thing to note is that KDE/Plasma do not need the whole kit and kaboodle of Qt, just the bits Plasma normally uses, so maintaining a 'Kt' fork might not be as huge an undertaking as it might seem.

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by claydoh View Post
        KDE has the threat of forking Qt, which seems to be tempering things. If there is enough interest in this, manpower-wise, it could happen. Especially now with many people ostensibly sitting idle due to social distancing.

        Another thing to note is that KDE/Plasma do not need the whole kit and kaboodle of Qt, just the bits Plasma normally uses, so maintaining a 'Kt' fork might not be as huge an undertaking as it might seem.
        Qt denies the report: https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-and-open-source

        And, Qt4 was forked but CopperSpice now includes a majority of the Qt 5 classes : https://github.com/copperspice/copperspice
        Last edited by GreyGeek; Apr 13, 2020, 12:54 PM.
        "A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
        – John F. Kennedy, February 26, 1962.

        Comment


          #5
          Just to trace the source of the smell...
          On January 27, 2020 Qt posted the following:
          Much is happening around Qt these days: We have just opened the Qt Marketplace, released a new MCU offering as well as Qt 5.14, and the Design Studio is developing rapidly.
          To support the continuous growth that’s required to keep Qt as a development platform relevant, we need to make changes to our offering:
          • Installation of Qt binaries will require a Qt Account
          • Long-term-supported (LTS) releases and the offline installer will become available to commercial licensees only
          • New Qt offering for start-ups and small businesses for $499/year

          These changes will not have any effect on existing commercial licensing or services agreements.

          A KDE representative on the KDE Free Qt Foundation, Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer (along with Martin Konold), posted this comment:
          I will now give you a bit of background information.

          During the past two years, there have been negotiations between The Qt Company
          and the KDE Free Qt Foundation for updating the contract.

          Our goals in negotiations:
          * helping the company increase their revenue without harming the Qt project or
          the KDE community
          * strengthening the protection of the Qt project and of the KDE community
          * avoiding a parting of ways between The Qt Company and the Qt+KDE communities

          Concrete areas included in the negotiations are:

          * Fixing the incompatibility between paid Qt license terms and using or
          contributing to Open Source
          (“Prohibited Combination” in https://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/ )
          * Fixing the license incompatibility between the Qt Design Studio (which is
          only partly Free Software) and our existing contract with the company
          * Making our contract with the company stronger, requiring them to make
          immediate Free Software releases of Qt (currently, they are allowed to delay
          by 12 months) to ensure the availability of LTS security fixes for KDE
          * Updating our contract to include Wayland
          * Evaluating contract changes suggested by the company aimed at making the Qt
          business more profitable, for example the option of selling bundles of Qt with
          other software, or making integrations with proprietary third-party software
          possible
          ...
          But last week,(despite continuing negotiations on March 6th-GG) the company suddenly informed both the KDE e.V. board and the KDE Free QT Foundation that the economic outlook caused by the Corona virus puts more pressure on them to increase short-term revenue. As a result, they are thinking about restricting ALL Qt releases to paid license holders for the first 12 months. They are aware that this would mean the end of contributions
          via Open Governance in practice.


          Olaf continues in his post to hand out olive branches to Qt in order to maintain a mutually advantageous relationship, but Qt is now using the Corna virus as an explanation for the drop in income, which is probably true. Both sides are between rocks and hard places and no one can predict, with any assurity, how things will end up. With the release of Kubuntu 20.04 in 10 days we will have five years to see which way the ball will bounce.
          Last edited by GreyGeek; Apr 13, 2020, 01:34 PM.
          "A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
          – John F. Kennedy, February 26, 1962.

          Comment


            #6
            Yeah well. I took a little drive in the DeLorean... you know, just out of curiosity.

            Click image for larger version

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            The date is (obviously ;·) classified.



            [EDIT] Yeah, yeah, I messed up the kernel. Well, it's not a good enough joke to go and change it is it :·)
            Last edited by Don B. Cilly; Apr 13, 2020, 01:47 PM.

            Comment


              #7
              Kt 1.6.4!? Huh? Since when does Kt actually exist, Don!?
              Multibooting: Kubuntu Noble 24.04
              Before: Jammy 22.04, Focal 20.04, Precise 12.04 Xenial 16.04 and Bionic 18.04
              Win XP, 7 & 10 sadly
              Using Linux since June, 2008

              Comment


                #8
                He made his Conky 'look' that way; a mock up.
                Windows no longer obstructs my view.
                Using Kubuntu Linux since March 23, 2007.
                "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." - Sherlock Holmes

                Comment

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