QT: more releases are planned even for non-commercial 5.x about endoflife.date HOT 7 CLOSED

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from endoflife.date.

Thanks for raising this issue @SMillerDev.

That's not an easy one, so let's recap:

• 5.15 is documented as EOL on 26 May 2023 for "normal" users (26 May 2025 for commercial users), see https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-5.15-released.
• The KDE Project maintains a patch collection to support Qt 5.15 LTS for open-source users.
• All commercial updates become free after one year according to Homebrew/brew#16417 (comment) (quickly searched but did not found an official source).

So for using the 5.15 either you stick to the latest 5.15.x version released before 26 May 2023, or you need to subscribe to a commercial license. This seems confirmed by https://www.qt.io/blog/commercial-lts-qt-5.15.14-released:

Qt 5.15.14 is the last patch release during the standard Qt 5.15 Long-Term Support (LTS) phase that ends on 26th May 2023. The subsequent two years of patch releases will only be available to subscription license holders. For more information, see the May 26th, 2023: Qt 5.15 Standard Support for Legacy License Holders Ends Today and Extended lifetime for Qt 5.15 blog posts.

So here is what we can fix:

• the latest 5.15 should not be 5.15.2, which was released in 2020 but 5.15.14. Reverting the latest to this version in 999e7d4 was a mistake and needs to be fixed.
• we should document the free after one year rule if we can find an "official" link (e.g. something on a qt.io website).

But this won't change anything for the EOL date though. Do you see something to do at this level @SMillerDev ?

from endoflife.date.

@Bo98, do you maybe have a link?

from endoflife.date.

Indeed this is a complicated one and I'm not sure what the best way to express this in the EOL data is.

5.15 is documented as EOL on 26 May 2023 for "normal" users (26 May 2025 for commercial users), see https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-5.15-released.

Depends what you mean by a "normal" user. The 2023 date is also a commercial support end, just of a different purchasing tier.

The timeline is more like this:

• 2020-12-08 (6.0 release): on-time open-source/free support ends ("open-source users will receive patch-level releases of 5.15 until the next minor release" from https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020). The next patch version after this was a commericial-only release: https://www.qt.io/blog/commercial-lts-qt-5.15.3-released
• 2023-05-26: support for commercial users on fixed-term or perpetual licenses ends however those paying on a recurring subscription basis continue to have extended support (likely because the fixed-term payments were only for 3 years but subscription is constant so can fund longer): https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-5.15-support-ends
• 2025-05-26: end of Qt 5.15 fully (though last open source release will be 2026)

A contractual agreement made with the KDE Free Qt Foundation means all commercial releases must be made open source within 12 months. This wasn't announced on the Qt blog and is largely quiet from the Qt Company side but KDE do mention it at https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/. This policy has held true, as 5.15.3 was released open source in 2022: https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2022-March/042262.html. This is expected to continue even now that we're in extended subscription-only support. Here's also a link to the agreement, with signatures from the Qt Company: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreement_2015.pdf (clause 3 mentions the time period)

So it's basically like this:

However security support still seems to continue, at least at some level. I've not seen any explicit written policy on this so it's maybe informal but here's an example of a security patch being issued for 5.15 for free just two days ago (well into the subscription-only LTS period): https://www.qt.io/blog/security-advisory-potential-integer-overflow-in-qts-http2-implementation with the patch publicly available at https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/5.15/0001-CVE-2023-51714-qtbase-5.15.diff and https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/5.15/0002-CVE-2023-51714-qtbase-5.15.diff. There's several previous patches been issued in 5.15 over the LTS period: https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/5.15. My guess is this all falls under the catch-all clause of "if there are issues that would prevent the use of the latest release, there will be patches available even if we do not create new full patch releases for that version anymore" from https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020 and a security CVE is seen as something "preventing the use of the latest release" but Qt aren't exactly very transparent when it comes to open-source policies so it's difficult to tell. 🤷‍♂️

And to confuse things even more, the WebEngine component of Qt does not have a commerical-only period at all due to further license restrictions from using Chromium. So the current version, QtWebEngine 5.15.16 LTS, is available free for everyone immediately: https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtwebengine.git/tag/?h=v5.15.16-lts

So yeah, all a bit of a mess 😅

from endoflife.date.

Thanks a lot for all those information @Bo98. I tried to update and summarized what you said in #4451. A preview is available on https://deploy-preview-4451--endoflife-date.netlify.app/qt, could you give me your opinion about it ?

from endoflife.date.

Looks good to me, though I'd maybe rename the first column (eolColumn I think) to something else than the current "Security Support" naming.

from endoflife.date.

Looks good to me, though I'd maybe rename the first column (eolColumn I think) to something else than the current "Security Support" naming.

Thanks for the feedback, changed to "OSS support".

from endoflife.date.