KDE Free Qt Foundation – BOF and report

[Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer]

Hi everyone!

Please find our annual report on the KDE Free Qt Foundation below.

I am really happy that this year, I am able to attend Akademy, so I can set up 
a BOF session. It is intended for members of the KDE community who are 
interested in KDE’s collaboration with Qt. We will talk about the KDE Free Qt 
Foundation (legal setup; history and future; perspectives: What is important 
for the KDE community going forward?)

A cordial invitation to all KDEers! – Tuesday, 14 August, 9:30

It is great that many people from the Qt Company will also be at Akademy, so 
we will have a number of in-person meetings.

I look forward to meeting many of you in Vienna!

Best regards,

Olaf

==AGM Report from KDE Free Qt Foundation for 2017==

During the past year, the KDE Free Qt Foundation has been working on the 
following topics:

===Qt as Free Software===

All parts of Qt continue to be available under free software licenses
(for main part of Qt, under the LGPLv3 and also under GPLv2 or later; for some 
add-on modules, at least GPLv3) for desktop Linux, Android, Microsoft Windows, 
Microsoft Windows Phone, Apple MacOS and Apple iOS. Legally safeguarding this 
is the purpose of the KDE Free Qt Foundation

 https://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

As a separate product, the Qt Company has also released a 3D UI design tool in 
the meantime under the GPLv3. This code was originally contributed by NVIDIA 
Inc.

===Tooling===

The tools of Qt also fall under the Free Software conditions. The proprietary 
Qt Quick compiler (which used to lack compliance with our contract in the 
past) has been completely replaced by a superior Free Software alternative. 

We have requested the Qt Company to update their website accordingly.

Of course, the Qt Company keeps having the option to offer separate products 
(developed and sold separate from Qt).

===Qt 6===

The foundation also discussed the plans of the Qt Company for Qt 6.
Current plans are that there will be long term support releases in autumn 2018 
(Qt 5.12 LTS) and in spring 2020 (Qt 5.15 LTS), and that Qt 6.0 will be 
released in autumn 2020 as a cleanup release removing all APIs that have been 
deprecated in Qt 5.15.

There are no plans on removing any functionality from Qt, without having an 
appropriate replacement under the same license conditions. The Qt Company 
reassured us that any such removals would also be discussed in the foundation, 
as stipulated by our contracts.

(Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer and Martin Konold)