Hi, (Note: Parts of this mail are similar to a mail I sent to the kde-community list a couple of minutes ago, but the majority of it is different)
As some people here might already know, the KDE Free Qt foundation made a very concerning announcement yesterday: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.html In the announcement, one of the KDE representatives in that foundation claims that: [...] 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. (I encourage you to read the full announcement for some more context). As the maintainer of a web browser[1] using QtWebEngine, I find this deeply concerning. A year delay in security updates would be unacceptable for my project, so, realistically I'd need to take a decision between: a) Switching to something different like Chromium Embedded Framework, which means months of work on top of an ever-growing backlog; b) Buying a Qt Startup License with all that it entails (probably including qutebrowser not being a proper FOSS project anymore), which is pretty much not an option given the licensing terms; c) Throwing the towel after 6.5 years (which also means losing a donation-funded part-time job, not to mention abandoning a project and community which is of immense importance to me personally). Needless to say, that wouldn't be a decision I want to make, and this announcement from KDE really wasn't an easy thing to digest. Of course that announcement made its way to sites Phoronix and Reddit, and I'm sure it'll be picked up by more people soon. Yet, I haven't seen any prior public discussions about this (e.g. on this list). Today, The Qt Company released a quick statement: https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-and-open-source There have been discussions on various internet forums about the future of Qt open source in the last two days. The contents do not reflect the views or plans of The Qt Company. The Qt Company is proud to be committed to its customers, open source, and the Qt governance model. Unless I'm missing something, there aren't many possible interpretations of what's going on. 1) There was some kind of misunderstanding between KDE and Qt, and those statements never were intended they way that KDE cited them. I try to always assume good faith, but after more and more moves against the open-source side of Qt recently, I place a lot more trust in statements coming from KDE rather than those coming from TQtC... 2) Qt tried to bluff in order to force KDE to change some other provision of their contract, possibly even using the current pandemic as an excuse to do so. I find this repulsive, but unfortunately, it seems the most likely explanation, especially given this part of KDEs announcement: "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." 3) Qt is just trying to do damage control and still intends to follow through with those changes. Like I said, I always try to assume good faith, but the lack of transparency on TQtC's side about this topic really doesn't help. I completely understand that the Qt Company needs to pay its bills and developers, and that the Qt Project (and FOSS community) benefits a lot from that. I understand it's a very difficult balance to strike, and I can see how some of the recent changes could've been necessary from a business perspective. This, however, would kill Qt as we all know it. I'm still hoping there's a way out of this with as little damage as possible for everyone. But for that to happen, more transparency about what's going on from TQtC's side is needed. I'd very much appreciate a more detailed statement on what's gone wrong here. Finally: I know I'm starting a public discussion about this topic on a public mailinglist. I know some readers will have very strong opinions agains the Qt Company after the announcement, and I can understand where you're coming from. But before throwing expletives at people, please reconsider and maybe take a break first (I'd suggest a walk, but alas, that's difficult right now). Let's please keep this a civilized and constructive discussion despite the circumstances. Florian -- m...@the-compiler.org (Mail/XMPP) | https://www.qutebrowser.org https://bruhin.software/ | https://github.com/sponsors/The-Compiler/ GPG: 916E B0C8 FD55 A072 | https://the-compiler.org/pubkey.asc I love long mails! | https://email.is-not-s.ms/
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