I only recently became aware that Qt is actively trying to pull away from open source[0].
I understand that people do things for reasons, but this situation looks pretty sad to me.
[0]: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h...
I understand that people do things for reasons, but this situation looks pretty sad to me.
[0]: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h...
>All software changes in Qt will still be available at as Open Source as required by our contract – maybe with a delay of 12 months if the company decides to part ways with the communities.
It's hassle to maintain LPGL version with 12 month lag for sure.
What if they decide to put all the docs behind a paywall? And if they can't because of licensing reasons, what if they just stop paying people to update the docs and make a new version of the docs without licensing restrictions?
There are a lot of ways this can get worse.
Licensing protection isn't a silver bullet. If the organization becomes hostile, it only guarantees you the ability to fork. While that's huge, it's of limited utility if the project is too big to fork. See Chromium. I think Qt may be too big to fork.
Qt is effin' huge, but it is also at the core of a big and diverse ecosystem. There are many, many users across various industries, including big players and there are companies that offer consulting and development services specifically around Qt. If the Qt Company was to piss enough of these users off, they could easily join forces to create an economically feasible fork. The real trick would be avoiding competing forks, I think.
[1] https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/