The Qt Company is immediately restricting the visibility of the Qt-5. 15 branch to the public. The long-term support release (LTS) Qt 5. 15 will for the first time only be available to paying customers, according to an email to Qts Development Mailing list.

The company wants to keep the branch visible to the public, but it no longer provides any new patches. The branch is also closed for new commits, with the exception of the QtWebEngine and the Qt Script marked as deprecated, due to LGPL dependencies on a third party.

LTS release only for commercial customers The company had already announced this step in January 2020 that brings many customers an unpredictable future. Now the rule is that only paying customers will have access to the private repository and the code that includes the future LTS point releases for Qt 5. 15. The first purely commercial Qt 5. 15 LTS Tagged Release should appear in February.

A year ago, the Qt Company had the changes in a Blog post summarized. As a justification, the company stated that this change should ensure the further growth of Qt as a platform. The company hopes that the need for a Qt account to install binaries will generate more contributions from the open source community, as a user account has always been mandatory for bug reports and code reviews.

Qt’s offline installer, on the other hand, is a feature that is particularly interesting for corporate customers. The elimination of the free option should therefore clearly make the paid product “more attractive”. However, the company believes the impact on open source users is small. Open source developers should also have to switch to new Qt versions more quickly, which the company hopes to get more feedback on the individual versions. The LTS releases are reserved for paying customers who are dependent on a certain Qt version for their own products.

(mdo)