Qt “LTS” only for paying customers, not OSS or private individuals
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/2021-January/036162.html
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/2021-January/036163.html
This is very interesting. Basically, Qt stops doing LTS unless you pay for it. This differs from before, where OSS users could also get the security and bugfix patches, but only if their applications were compatible with the copyleft licences.
(Due to the agreement with KDE e.V. the Qt patches must be made open source at least a year after creation, but having a year of unpatched security and other bugs will not be fun…)
I really hope that MuseScore core developers will now stop thinking in Qt LTS releases and instead consider more which releases are available / used by end users, whether LTS or not (e.g. availability in GNU distributions, availability for various Mac OSX releases, …).
Comments
Follow-up posts confirm this. Only the latest Qt release is ever available as Open Source. (So the LTS patches for the old release don’t even count.)
So now that Qt 6.0 is out, anything else is unsupported for OSS. Once Qt 6.1 will be out, Qt 6.0 will be unsupported.
Only GNU distributions that backport important and security fixes to the respective releases, such as Debian, offer a way to justify continuing to run an older version.