Qt, Open Source and corona

[Jens]

On onsdag 8 april 2020 kl. 12:53:47 CEST Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer wrote:
> But last week, the company suddenly informed both the KDE e.V. board and the
> KDE Free QT Foundation that the economic outlook caused by the Corona virus
> puts more pressure on them to increase short-term revenue. As a result,
> they are thinking about restricting ALL Qt releases to paid license holders
> for the first 12 months. They are aware that this would mean the end of
> contributions via Open Governance in practice.
> 

Also if Qt becomes more hostile to the Open Source community that would mean a 
slower pace of new contributors who learn the software and expand their 
software use professionally in the future.

> We hope The Qt Company will reconsider. However, this threat to the Open
> Source community needs to be anticipated, so that the Qt and KDE communities
> can prepare themselves.
> 

The issue is for KDE is that we can't prepare ourselves. We can't fork Qt, 
because we lack the manpower to safely do so currently. At the same time we 
can't afford them to be as openly hostile to Open Source as they have been 
these last months since that means that contributors to our project dries up 
as less and less people feel comfortable contributing to a project reliant on 
another project who is openly trying to divorce itself from that same 
community.

What are our alternatives?

> The Qt Company says that they are willing to reconsider the approach only if
> we offer them concessions in other areas. I am reminded, however, of the
> situation half a year ago. We had discussed an approach for contract
> updates, which they suddenly threw away by restricting LTS releases of Qt
> instead.
> 

This is nonsense. What concessions are we to give them that would bump their 
revenue short term if that is their core problem right now? It seems as if 
they are simply hounding for concessions and nothing else. 

The fact that they want to burn the field and still think they can harvest come 
spring is to me ridicilulous and seems to be done by someone who has no 
understanding of the process of work involved in their own project on the 
technical or social level.

I think we shouldn't give them any concessions. 

/jens