On Fri, 25 Feb 2022 at 01:40, Volker Hilsheimer <volker.hilshei...@qt.io> wrote:
> My question to you is: how can we make it easier, or more fun, or more > motivating to contribute to Qt, and to help with making things better? Speaking from my personal perspective: The situation with the open source releases and the new LTS update policy is the #1 thing holding me back from contributing to Qt. I just can't justify the time investment required to fix bugs in Qt if I'll only see the benefit of those fixes in 12+ months time, when the applications I use have been ported to Qt 6. Speaking from a downstream project's perspective: I'm heavily involved in the QGIS application (https://qgis.org/en/site/), which is an open-source GIS based on Qt. The QGIS project has a good history of contributing fixes to Qt for issues which impact us -- we contract out to KDAB to implement these fixes on our behalf. Over recent years we've probably invested around 20k EUR into Qt via KDAB. I'd like to think the QGIS project is a very well behaved open-source contributor in this regard! (And, for reference, there's plans to invest much more heavily in the future, especially in Qt's SVG support and QPainter framework). Unfortunately the LTS situation has made justifying the cost of funding these fixes difficult, as QGIS will remain on Qt 5 for the foreseeable future. Previously we could easily demonstrate the value of the fixes as ALL our users would (eventually!) see the fix, regardless of whether they were on Windows/Mac or linux builds. Now only a very tiny portion of our users receive the fixes (specifically, those using recent Fedora releases, as Fedora have moved away from Qt 5 upstream packages to instead following the KDE maintained 5.15 fork). Our Windows, Mac and debian based users will likely never get the fix for their Qt 5 versions. So, please, if you want to see more community contributions you NEED to reverse the LTS licensing situation (at least for the Qt 5.15 version). Nyall _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest
