LWN: Comments on "Qt offering changes 2020"

Qt offering changes 2020

pabs — Sun, 19 Apr 2020 04:20:59 +0000

Some commentary on the Qt situation:

https://www.hellozee.dev/thoughts-on-qt/

Qt offering changes 2020

garloff — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 20:05:45 +0000

Linux distros compile from sources...
... if this was what you referred to with downstream distributors.

Qt offering changes 2020

luto — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 06:20:08 +0000

My point is that The Qt Company is under no obligation to make the downloadable installer open-source at all.

Qt offering changes 2020

pabs — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 04:55:40 +0000

Another:

http://mardy.it/blog/2020/01/theqtcompany-and-a-silly-dec...

Qt offering changes 2020

mathstuf — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 04:22:28 +0000

I think "GPLv3" was a typo or thinko. But they'd have to be LGPLv3 compatible otherwise any FOSS app redistributing Qt inside their packages would be have to recompile from source to redistribute the libraries from the SDK. If you're implying that they'd be under some non-FOSS license.

Qt offering changes 2020

luto — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 02:06:18 +0000

> Under GPLv3, you don't even need the source code to do that, as long as you don't redistribute externally.

I would be rather surprised if the binary is GPLv3.

Qt offering changes 2020

pabs — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 14:15:52 +0000

A couple of responses from KDE folks:

https://valdyas.org/fading/software/about-qt-offering-cha...
https://tsdgeos.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-qt-company-is-st...

Qt offering changes 2020

lisandropm — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 13:44:13 +0000

Bug fixes should first go to the latests branchs and then to the LTS branch, which the sole exemption of bugs only present in LTS branches. This happens when the code gets refactored in later versions.

Qt offering changes 2020

lisandropm — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 13:41:48 +0000

Security patchs will certainly be provided. And normally backporting them tends to be easy.

Qt offering changes 2020

LtWorf — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 12:11:53 +0000

That seems very far fetched. specially because continuous integration systems do not re-download the binaries from Qt every single time. And if they do certainly Qt is aware of that massive traffic from the same one IP even without accounts being set up.

I suspect they want to force people to have accounts so that it is then less effort to post bugreports, since the account is already made.

Qt offering changes 2020

LtWorf — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 12:08:45 +0000

Yes they already say in that very same post that no account is needed to download the sources.

Qt offering changes 2020

halla — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 10:25:21 +0000

There is no "new license". Most of Qt is LGPL/GPL, some parts are GPL only, and you can get a commercial license that also hasn't changed.

What has changed is that the Qt company now searches the utter boundaries of the agreement it has with the KDE Free Qt Foundation (https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php) to entice commercial parties to buy the commercial license.

The KDE Free Qt Foundation's agreement cannot be broken by the Qt company. Even going broke and selling the assets to a new company won't break the agreement.

And that means that Qt is free software; that hasn't changed. The Qt company is just playing mean little tricks with the binaries they build and their gateway to the download site.

Qt offering changes 2020

scientes — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 03:23:24 +0000

> This blog reads like the main aim is to find commercial users of open source Qt.

Sounds reasonable, and I have no problems with this business model which Red Hat first championed. It keeps the ethics, while still proving that the project has value by selling convenience.

Qt offering changes 2020

rahulsundaram — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 02:56:21 +0000

> That's... less reassuring than it sounds. 12 months is a long time to wait for a (hypothetical) security patch...

My impression from the post is that all patches go into the non LTS version first. If they mark security patches as such, long term distributions can handle backporting

Qt offering changes 2020

pabs — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 01:14:58 +0000

I wonder if this violates the agreement between Qt and KDE, since such violations would trigger releasing Qt under the BSD license.

Qt offering changes 2020

NYKevin — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 01:08:48 +0000

That's... less reassuring than it sounds. 12 months is a long time to wait for a (hypothetical) security patch...

Qt offering changes 2020

rahulsundaram — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:12:05 +0000

> So while the current source is currently available under the GPL, the binaries redistributed from Qt's website to people with Qt accounts might not be, and future versions of the source code made available by Qt could be under any other license terms that Qt feels like releasing under - and possibly only those other terms that Qt feels like releasing under.

Any other license will have to be limited to 12 months according to https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

Qt offering changes 2020

Karellen — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 23:45:56 +0000

The code is still GPL/LGPL so you can distribute binaries all you like as long as you distribute the sources as well.

Yes, you can redistribute all the binaries you have received under the GPL (as long as you adhere to the other license requirements....) But, Qt either holds the copyrights for the parts they wrote, or have made external contributors agree to the Qt Contribution Agreement (source) for their parts, which states in §3.1:

Licensor hereby grants [...] to The Qt Company a sublicensable, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid-up copyright and trade secret license to [...] make available and distribute Licensor Contribution(s) and any derivative works thereof under license terms of The Qt Company’s choosing including any Open Source Software license.

(emphasis mine) So while the current source is currently available under the GPL, the binaries redistributed from Qt's website to people with Qt accounts might not be, and future versions of the source code made available by Qt could be under any other license terms that Qt feels like releasing under - and possibly only those other terms that Qt feels like releasing under.

Qt offering changes 2020

anselm — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 23:06:38 +0000

Qt, presumably. See https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php.

Qt offering changes 2020

ballombe — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 23:05:47 +0000

>Recreating this would be a major project requiring some serious time and resources.

But once you have a copy of the binaries, you can redistribute them at little cost.

> This blog reads like the main aim is to find commercial users of open source Qt. If every Mac/Windows programmer has to ping Qt for updates then the Qt Company can simply search their logs for many users on a single IP address and then get in contact with legal@that IP and see if they can plant a few seeds of doubt.

They could use their http log already without requiring an account...
Now people will be encouraged to download from a third party website and they will get nothing.

Qt offering changes 2020

NYKevin — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 23:02:26 +0000

Well, that's not going to work at all. The IT department will download one copy of the binaries with a Qt account, then redistribute them internally. Under GPLv3, you don't even need the source code to do that, as long as you don't redistribute externally.* But if, for whatever reason, the lawyers decide they do need the source code, then IT just downloads that too, so no big deal either way.

That would suggest the real target is shadow IT (users downloading Qt by themselves without the IT department's involvement). But I can't seriously imagine a large number of users even knowing what Qt is, let alone downloading it all by themselves. So I'm a bit confused about what the Qt folks think they're going to accomplish here.

* See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v3CoworkerConve...

Qt offering changes 2020

rschroev — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 22:45:45 +0000

> So if the worst comes to the worst, and the new license is that bad, we can at least work from the current codebase while we transition away from Qt.

Out of interest: should it come to that, do you have any plans about what you would be transitioning to?

Qt offering changes 2020

bovinespirit — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 22:13:52 +0000

The code is still GPL/LGPL so you can distribute binaries all you like as long as you distribute the sources as well. The thing is that building Qt is really hard. Every new release adds new dependencies and configuration options and a full build of everything takes a lot of configuration, a lot of processing, a lot of memory and usually a fair bit of trial and error. The Qt binaries package for Windows includes a mingw compiler, Qt Creator, all the required libraries and many other bits required to do software development on Windows. Recreating this would be a major project requiring some serious time and resources.

This blog reads like the main aim is to find commercial users of open source Qt. If every Mac/Windows programmer has to ping Qt for updates then the Qt Company can simply search their logs for many users on a single IP address and then get in contact with legal@that IP and see if they can plant a few seeds of doubt.

Qt offering changes 2020

Karellen — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 21:56:06 +0000

From the article:

The offline installer will also become commercial-only.

From the linked FAQ:

If only the online installer is available by default, what should users do that are working in an offline setup (no internet connection)?
Commercial users can request offline installers from The Qt Company, or possibly these are given to everyone via Qt Account like currently. Open-source user would need to build from source or go commercial.

So it looks like even with a free account you can't just download the binary packages.

One thing that isn't referenced in the article, or the FAQ, is whether Open Source users are allowed to redistribute binary packages that they've built. The article says "From February onward, everyone, including open-source Qt users, will require valid Qt accounts to download Qt binary packages." but I'm hoping there's an implied "...to download official, supported Qt binary packages from Qt" - not that open source users can't redistribute binary packages they themselves have built.

Unfortunately, the actual new license isn't linked, and I'm not interested in hunting it down and then reading it all to find out. We still have the last release under the old license, which is at least DFSG-free - because Qt is in Debian. So if the worst comes to the worst, and the new license is that bad, we can at least work from the current codebase while we transition away from Qt. Hopefully it won't come to that.

Qt offering changes 2020

jebba — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 20:57:54 +0000

The post says: "Note that source packages will still be available without a Qt account."

Qt offering changes 2020

nix — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 20:54:34 +0000

Pushing bugfixes into the latest non-LTS release is good: right now, some bugfixes are done first on LTS, some on the latest release, and some on random intermediate releases, wit the result that as I write this the LTS release works fine while 5.14.1-to-be's QT Assistant dumps core (well, for me, anyway).

Qt offering changes 2020

ttuttle — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 20:42:09 +0000

What's Qt's license? Can one person just get an account and download them and make them available for everyone else?

Qt offering changes 2020

anarcat — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 20:40:28 +0000

The key thing here is "require valid Qt accounts to download Qt binary packages". Hopefully, that will allow downstream distributions to get the source code without an account and build binary packages that doesn't have that... feature.