On 27/01/20 20:05, Gerald Combs wrote:
The Qt Company recently announced upcoming changes in the distribution of their official binaries:
https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2020-January/thread.html#38316
Two of the changes adversely affect how we develop and build Wireshark, primarily on Windows and macOS. First, downloading official releases from qt.io will require logging in with a Qt account. How much of an issue is this for people developing Wireshark on those platforms? Is it enough to warrant switching to a different, unofficial source for Qt binaries? I'm not really thrilled about the prospect of Qt salespeople pestering someone who just wants to build a Wireshark dissector.
Second, LTS releases will no longer be open source starting with Qt 5.15. We currently ship the latest LTS version of Qt with our Windows and macOS packages. I'm not sure how we're going to handle this in the future.
[This isn't really related to Wireshark directly]
I understand the need for revenue by the Qt Company. I think we are in
this quite farcical situation because of the LGPL.
They should remove that license with the agreement of the KDE Free Qt
Foundation, commercial projects pay, the FOSS community gets to use the
toolkit and contribute back (not this we love open-source but were going
to close our product bullcrap).
It's the way that it's always been done and it's not broken either.