Qt 5.15.11 open source released | Hacker News Reader

Qt 5.15.11 open source released

lists.qt-project.org

37 pointsneustradamus11 comments

From Trolltech to Nokia to Digia and now to its own company, Qt has been through a lot. I wonder what license they're running under now.

Edit: looks like it's a mix of GPLs, LGPLs, and their own license.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28software

When I last did a client project using Qt they were intentionally running an older open source version (3.x?) in order to avoid having to pay license fees.

Likewise, I wonder if this latest mix of licenses can be used without fees.

Most of Qt ships under your choice of 3 different licenses: GPL, Commercial, and LGPL. Their sales people and marketing material like to pretend the LGPL version doesn't exist, and that you need a Commercial license to do any commercial software development.

But that's just not the case. The LGPL license works great for many/most commercial applications.

(Watch out for a couple of the addons/extras that don't have an LGPL version.)

The anti-tivoization stuff in version 3 really messed it up for a lot of customers. There's no way they're allowing DIY firmware into their units.

I thought the open source support window for Qt5 ended years ago.

Why are they still pushing updates if they could just sell highly priced commercial licenses for extended support? That is what I would expect of the Qt Company…

They do, but the KDE Free Qt Foundation agreement requires them to make those commercial-only releases open source after a maximum of 12 months.

Precisely 12 months later. Cutting it fine!

Worth noting that KDE maintains a patched open source Qt releases with additional patches that may only be in commercial releases https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qt5/

Where can I download binaries for Windows and OSX?

I've used aqt[1] before but it doesn't look like it's seeing 5.15.11 yet, just 5.15.2.

[1]: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

Found this:

https://download.qt.io/online/qtsdkrepository/

It has binaries from different compilers, for example:

https://download.qt.io/online/qtsdkrepository/windows_x86/de...

The online installer is the official way. Don't know if it can download binaries for other platforms.

https://www.qt.io/download-open-source

> Looking for Qt binaries?

> Find them in the Qt Online Installer. It will steer you to the right download version and help you install tools and add-on components that are available for your open source license.

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