
Qt Offering Changes 2020 - jandeboevrie
https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020
======
nabla9
Why is inability to download and install binaries from qt.io without login
such of show stopper for people here?

Other sites and organizations can compile and distribute the binaries.

KDE Free Qt Foundation -The KDE Free Qt Foundation is an organization with the
purpose of securing the availability of the Qt toolkit
[https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php](https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php)

~~~
icandoit
This marks the of the end of a cooperative relationship and the beginning of a
confrontational relationship.

Imagine getting a phone call like, "Can we send our license specialist to your
premises and conduct an audit of your code?".

Leveraging Qt code just went from an asset to a liability.

~~~
badsectoracula
FWIW if you bothered to check their website's language after Nokia (i think),
Qt already had a confrontational relationship. It is just that they were
slowly building it up over time.

And really, ever since the Trolltech days, Qt was dragged into open source
kicking and screaming.

~~~
Morxo
In the Trolltech days, Open Source Qt was GPL-only. And up until Qt 4, the
Windows port was Commercial-only.

Nokia introduced LGPL and open governance, simply because they were not
interested in Qt as a commercial product, and The Qt Company is now trying to
build a business around this. With huge companies like Tesla building their
product around the free version of Qt without complying with the open source
licenses, it is not that hard to see why they would look for ways to find out
who their actual users are.

------
adev_
A lot of noise for no reasons.

You can not enforce login in for GPL / LGPL software distribution.

Meaning this is just probably that the "click/download" link for the binary
official SDK on the official website will require registration, nothing else.

If it's really the case, they should be clearer in their explanations.

~~~
johannes1234321
They can enforce it for downloads from their site. By adding some non-free
component into that process they can make it hard for others to ship those
packages.

However as long as they use (L)GPL and don't play trademark games, they can't
stop others from providing builds.

For such builds there is a question how trustworthy they are (afaik there are
no reproducible builds for Qt) and how hard maintaining such builds is.

~~~
adev_
> For such builds there is a question how trustworthy they are (afaik there
> are no reproducible builds for Qt)

To their defense, very few organizations have reproducible build systems and
when they have, it's not compatible with the package manager of the Linux
distros anyway

~~~
johannes1234321
Right, but Qt builds one can probably trust. Some random account on GitHub
less.

------
svnpenn
> Installation of Qt binaries will require a Qt Account

Uh, what? I use programs like VLC and QbitTorrent which are built on Qt:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#Applications_usi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_\(software\)#Applications_using_Qt)

does that mean these require Qt registration by the end user?

~~~
XzAeRosho
No, it means that if you want to bundle Qt binaries in your application, you
as a developer, will need to be registered.

~~~
grawprog
It doesn't say specifically -dev binaries, it says 'installation of qt
binaries' which I need to install any qt based software unless i want to build
the libraries from source. If they mean bundling qt binaries in your app they
should say that. This makes it seem like everyone needs to register to install
anything that relies on having a qt binary installed on your system.

If I install qt through a package manager, do I need to be registered or would
the package maintainer need to be registered?

~~~
regularfry
If you're installing through a package manager, you're _probably_ installing
something built from source rather than downloaded as a binary from upstream.

~~~
inetknght
> _If you 're installing through a package manager, you're probably installing
> something built from source rather than downloaded as a binary from
> upstream._

I didn't get that impression from linked Qt blog post. I parsed the blog post
to mean any/all binaries built. Eg if you build your own binaries from the
open source license, you can't distribute them without a commercial or
distribution license. Likewise, you can't download Qt binaries without a Qt
account. It effectively locks out anyone who's not a developer and doesn't
want a Qt account but does want to install some pre-built open source
software.

~~~
jupp0r
It sounds like dynamically linking is ok, but statically linking against Qt is
not.

~~~
jcelerier
that is 10000% unrelated

~~~
jupp0r
Care to elaborate? You are distributing Qt binaries in one case, you aren't in
the other.

~~~
jcelerier
why would dynamically linked binaries be Qt ones specifically ? every linux
distro and a lot of apps do Qt rebuilds which aren't "official Qt framework
binaries".

------
Fr0styMatt88
I made a joke once that the Godot open-source game engine had 'accidentally'
become an amazing alternative to Qt (Godot's own editor is itself a Godot
application and quite nice for a desktop UI).

Notwithstanding what Qt offers in the embedded space, I think it's interesting
to ask the question more seriously. For rich, cross-platform desktop
applications, is a game engine a better choice than Qt?

~~~
pier25
Does Godot support vector graphics?

Another good alternative would be JUCE. It's made for audio dev but it is
crossplatform and has support for resolution independent UIs. It supports
OpenGL and AFAIK Metal and Vulkan support are on the way.

[https://juce.com/](https://juce.com/)

Also Flutter will support desktop at some point.

~~~
p_l
Does either support IMEs, accessibility (across all platforms)?

There's more to a good modern UI toolkit than just drawing the GUI, and I
don't mean the utility libs that used to be important but honestly aren't
anymore, but things that are part of UI/UX like accessibility and apropriate
integration with OS features for it.

~~~
pier25
Not sure but probably not. If accessibility and integration with the OS are
important it's probably better to go with Cocoa and .NET/UWP instead of a
crossplatform solution.

I imagine QT solves this as well but at $5000+ per developer per year it might
make more sense to have 2 codebases with native UIs and shared code. I looked
into that option recently and using Nim to transpile to C/C++ for the shared
business logic/network/etc seemed like the best option.

~~~
p_l
GTK, QT, wxWidgets all support accessibility. And Cocoa/UWP are not the end
all, be all of platforms where one might want an accessible GUI program.
Making three different GUI codebases is right out, IMO, for most cases I'm
looking at, and libraries that have zero support for accessibility don't get a
pass (thus I have no interest in any imgui solution, as they are inimical to
accessible UI).

The news about Qt unfortunately mean I have to consider whether to put effort
into upgrading the toolkit I have to Qt5 (or wait for Qt6 but still have a
sword of damocles over me) :/

------
qwerty456127
What a wonderful effort to prevent Qt popularity from growing.

Read the title and thought "perhaps this is time to explore more into Qt,
beyond the classic Qt widgets...". Read the news - "no, this seems more like
time to forget about Qt altogether and explore the alternatives".

~~~
jhoechtl
Which there are? Gtk3? Electron? I do not see any cross-platform gui toolkit
which comes even close to Qt

~~~
qwerty456127
Gtk3 obviously isn't an alternative as it's not really cross-platform (perhaps
it is, I don't know for sure, but I haven't ever seen a single GTK3 app on
Windows or on a Mac, there probably is a reason). Electron? Perhaps but it's
ridiculously resource-hungry. What remains are wxWidgets and, maybe, Flutter.

~~~
cycloptic
GTK3 works decently well on those platforms but there are still minor bugs and
compatibility issues. There is no reason for this other than that there hasn't
been much interest among developers in keeping the backends up to date. Also,
GTK3 recently hit maintenance mode and most developer activity has moved to
GTK4.

------
rcarmo
Hmm. Sad about needing to log in to download anything. Seems like prioritising
marketing KPIs over developer experience.

Anyway, not to be nitpicky or anything, but there is a typo on "feedback we
can get _form_ the community" \- otherwise I think it's actually positive to
offer point releases on a periodic basis.

------
seren
I have not been affected but I heard some teams where a QT rep was interested
to understand how they were using QT. Skip fast forward 2 years later, they
now have to pay QT licenses while they where using the open source version
before.

It might have been a good business decision to get more support, or to use
some non GPL components, but I can't help to think that the not so friendly
push from the QT rep was also a reason...

So I got the feeling this is just another step in that same direction.

~~~
distances
> I have not been affected but I heard some teams where a QT rep was
> interested to understand how they were using QT. Skip fast forward 2 years
> later, they now have to pay QT licenses while they where using the open
> source version before.

Do you mean they weren't compliant with the open source license, or that the
rep sold the commercial support?

~~~
seren
Honestly, I don't exactly know so my answer is a bit vague. I believe they
were compliant but I got the feeling from the discussion that the rep was
pushing hard so that they get a commercial license, to not having to bother
cherry picking only the GPL components and not having to display licenses and
making the source code available. (which was done previously)

It is a bit strange that QT can at the same time boast about its open source
roots, but in practice, discouraging its corporate users to use that license,
which is understandable from a business perspective.

~~~
kbenson
Your original comment sounded a bit negative towards Qt, but it sounds like
either the company was not legally complying with the license (in which case
Qt was owed some money) or the company found some benefit in the paid product.
In either case, I'm not sure there's a way I would view it negatively (unless
Qt changed licensing on some used components such that the company was in
compliance in the past but ended up unknowingly not being compliant by the
time the rep was talking with them).

Talking to a sales rep isn't _always_ a bad thing. Sometimes they let you know
interesting things that are for offer you didn't know about, but would have
bought if you did (or can give you trials of things you've been interested in
but unwilling to pull the trigger on because you weren't sure how it would
work).

~~~
giovannibajo1
My company has been a Qt partner for 10 years now. It’s embarrassing how many
companies we met that were not complaining with the open source license — most
of them did comply after they talked to us though. Our market (Italy) is
specially allergic to runtime licenses (required for embedded products, which
is 90% of what companies use Qt for, at least here) so they prefer to bend
over for compliance rather than spending on a runtime license.

------
turrini
The ongoing thread on the Qt mailing list:

[https://lists.qt-
project.org/pipermail/development/2020-Janu...](https://lists.qt-
project.org/pipermail/development/2020-January/038316.html)

------
nurettin
Qt is quickly rising to Delphi levels of unaffordability.

------
detaro
Seeing people freak out over this, it's typical Qt Company: Really, really bad
at communicating changes properly. Yes, it's annoying, but far from the big
deal people make it out to be.

------
nizmow
>From February onward, everyone, including open-source Qt users, will require
valid Qt accounts to download Qt binary packages.

Hopefully this doesn't include redistributed binaries. I really do like KDE.

~~~
jasonjayr
> Note that source packages will still be available without a Qt account.

From the post. Once you download + rebuild, your binaries built from the OSS
version can't have additional restrictions, otherwise they cease to be true
GPL ...

~~~
nottorp
They changed the license from LGPL to GPL?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Qt has various components under different licences. Some are GPL.

~~~
nottorp
Oh? When did they add that? Sneaky. I'm not current with what's happening with
Qt >=5.

With all the threats and restrictions and enterprise pricing for commercial
licenses, it looks like Qt is heading towards Delphi levels of irrellevance.

~~~
slavik81
A while back they added GPLv3 as an option for modules that used to only be
available under the commercial license. They're listed here:
[https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-
addons](https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons)

------
icandoit
Can't vouch for it, but there may be an alternative:

"CopperSpice is a set of individual libraries which can be used to develop
cross platform software applications in C++. It is a totally open source
project released under the LGPL V2.1 license and was initially derived from
the Qt framework. Over the last several years CopperSpice has completely
diverged, with a goal of providing a first class GUI library to unite the C++
community."

[https://www.copperspice.com](https://www.copperspice.com)

------
jonbronson
"Installation of Qt binaries will require a Qt Account"

Farewell, Qt.

~~~
est31
Won't sudo apt install qtcreator still work? Just use your distro packages.

~~~
Kelteseth
Sure but they will not contain the most recent versions of Qt/QtCreator. Also
many of us Qt developer still need to develop Windows specific stuff... I
guess vcpkg is the way to go here.

What would be funny though if someone would setup a CI for Qt/QtCreator and
distribute the binaries via a custom version of their open source installer
framework (which is basically the maintenance tool). So just like before. When
enough people switch to this tool maybe the qt company would stop forcing
logins.

~~~
est31
> if someone would setup a CI for Qt/QtCreator and distribute the binaries

Actually this reminds me how Oracle started distributing JRE through
proprietary terms for non-personal use. It led to people creating third party
GPL builds. Now they can't even bundle the ask! toolbar any more because
people use a different installer :).

------
pier25
$499 for small companies and startups.

QT is finally understanding their pricing was totally wrong.

~~~
gloggy
For companies earning under $100000 a year. That's pretty meager for a company
employing up to 5 people. Qt is a great environment, but it is still
ridiculously expensive for small companies.

~~~
penagwin
Yeah wait a minute - 100k USD a year is barely one developer (Especially after
benefit costs, etc) - and they say revenue too.

So basically if you're a one man shop it's an improvement I guess?

~~~
johannes1234321
According to their 2018 report they have 45.6M EUR in sales and loss of 2322
Euro. No idea where the 100k ist coming from.

[https://mb.cision.com/Main/14183/2742082/991814.pdf](https://mb.cision.com/Main/14183/2742082/991814.pdf)
(host blocked by uBlock for me)

~~~
SyneRyder
They were referring to the new Qt license. Companies with less than $100k in
revenue and less than five employees now only have to pay $499/year for a Qt
commercial license.

------
w-m
> From February onward, everyone, including open-source Qt users, will require
> valid Qt accounts to download Qt binary packages. We changed this because we
> think that a Qt account lets you make the best use of our services and
> contribute to Qt as an open-source user.

It is quite annoying to get these thinly-veiled pseudo-reasons for forcing
people to login to get the download. Surely they just want to know names and
affiliations of who downloads their open source versions.

That's understandable from a business perspective, but then please don't put
some bullshit there about needing to register at download time to do code
reviews and contribution.

~~~
bdamm
Or put another way, we want relationships with our users. There's lots of ways
that could play out, including money, but it's not surprising at all that a
business wants to know who its customers and potential customers are. Next.

~~~
ThreeFx
You are absolutely right, but in the light of how these "register to download"
changes played out in almost every case we have every reason to be cynical
IMO...

------
mroche
I do find some of these changes annoying, but not particularly life-
threatening. The use of a Qt account to download pre-built binaries by not
being allowed to press skip will be annoying, but realistically speaking how
often are you doing that? If you need them for CI, then you should (in my
small world) be downloading once and hosting them yourself.

With regards to LTS binaries, it is unfortunate, but we’ll still be able to
grab sources from Git and (hopefully) their download site to rebuild patch
versions from source.

The other note that sticks out is the cheaper license for the Device Creation
kit. This is for embedded systems, not general applications which I haven’t
seen anyone mention.

~~~
slavik81
> With regards to LTS binaries, it is unfortunate

I think this actually applies to LTS sources as well, which is even more
unfortunate. Though, their response to this question on the mailing list was
rather unclear.

------
wwarner
My read of this is that you're free to continue to build and distribute your
own binaries, but those won't be able to participate in the plugin ecosystem.
The effect of this change depends on the value of the plugin service. I mean,
it could be great. I certainly hope it's great for the Qt project.

------
fulafel
Does there exist a CentOS equivalent of Qt?

~~~
ainiriand
I don't think that Qt is unavailable in CentOS.

~~~
rusticpenn
I think he meant an alternate build from source packages ( Like Centos to
Redhat)

------
Macha
I did feel something was afoot when a KDE developer blogged a warning shot
about the terms of their agreement:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21755337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21755337)

------
inetknght
> _Installation of Qt binaries will require a Qt Account_

I've used Qt in professional environments with commercial licensing at
previous gigs. I'd considered using Qt for personal projects using their open
source licensing. But this is a killer requirement. Goodbye, Qt.

~~~
dkersten
I’ve also been a longtime fan of Qt, who has both argued for it and defended
it in discussions, as well as used it in a startup I founded and in a separate
commercial contract project. But this news means that I likely won’t use it
again and certainly won’t recommend it anymore.

~~~
distances
It's an inconvenience, but it's a requirement for the developer and not the
end user. Hardly the main criteria when selecting your framework is it?

~~~
nottorp
Problem is, if you check out qt.io you'll get an almost Oracle like
impression. That is, "don't go near us unless you have a full time legal
department".

"Download the open source version if you're sure you can comply with the LGPL"
is just a threat, pure and simple.

Thus, I wouldn't touch Qt in a commercial venture that is too small to have
full time legal counsel on hand.

5500/year/developer is significant just about everywhere outside Silicon
Valley.

[Editing comment because we're over HN's threading limits] @avamander:

But who decides that I've complied with the LGPL? Do you think it's as simple
as dynamically linking with their provided binaries and making public any
patches to Qt? I don't think so. It smells to me that if they decide you owe
them money, there'll be a lawsuit coming.

~~~
Avamander
I don't find it a loss if you can't comply with libre software's licenses and
don't then use them illegally. I am also glad Qt makes it clear that licenses
should be respected.

------
rafaelvasco
Used Qt with Python a lot, 6 or 7 years ago. Their API's are really great.
It's farewell I guess.

------
EliRivers
_LTS and offline installer to become commercial-only_

"All you freeloaders will become the test monkeys for our actual paying
customers" :)

------
chrisseaton
What is an 'offering'? Does it mean the licence agreement, or the product, or
the pricing plan?

I don't know this business terminology.

------
mister_hn
They've just broke the existing support from Conan recipes.

What a badass move

~~~
wink
How so?

~~~
mister_hn
you need an online account to download the package

~~~
wink
Well, that's what the announcement is about, but a) that's not in effect _yet_
and b) shouldn't the conan packages be built from source anyway?

Also, are you talking about [https://github.com/bincrafters/conan-
qt](https://github.com/bincrafters/conan-qt) or anything else?

------
thomas232233
Is it legal to torrent. Not that i care about. Forget it. Bye Qt

------
turrini
With this move they will be considerably shrinking their developer base since
a large, if not most, are enthusiasts of open source. Many frameworks made the
same mistake in the past and now they're restricted to a small niche or have
fallen into oblivion.

