> You obviously don’t trust that TQtC will treat the data the online-installer either demands or requires with the appropriate confidence. > So, shouldn't you build Qt from sources? Your IP address is PII, after all. Why did you trust that The Qt Company didn’t collect personal > data from you previously - just because you didn’t have to enter your email address?
Those who use Qt professionally will most probably register with their company emails. Based on this information, The Qt Company might theoretically estimate the number of developers at this particular company and try to pursue the sales much more aggressively. There are companies using the LGPL version of Qt in their products and are happy about it. From what I see (as a private user of Qt since Qt 3) for the past months or maybe even a year, The Qt Company has been trying to confuse (potential) users of the open-source version of Qt with vague wording and demands to contribute to the library. Take, for example, the latest Maintenance Tool: [image: image.png] So what we read in the first bullet point is just misleading: "You must not mix software, developed with the commercial license with the code developed with the Open Source license". Put into context, with "Qt Open Source" as the page title, a potential user understands this as "you cannot use open-source Qt if you develop commercial software", and this is wrong. You can use the LGPL modules of Qt in your commercial software if you comply with LGPL, which does not necessarily mean distributing the source code of your software. For the past year or two, the Downloads page at qt.io was redesigned at least several times. With every redesign, it became better and better but there was a version or two where you couldn't even find a link to the open-source versions of Qt. Let us look at the version as of May 2019 ( https://web.archive.org/web/20190516121937/https://www.qt.io/): Can you find a link to the open-source version of Qt at the landing page? No, but you see "Start free trial" which implies that Qt is a commercial product, and if you scroll all the way down, you see "Buy now" and "Contact request". So where is the open-source Qt? Now if you know that you have to choose "Start free trial" in order to get the open-source version, you get to a comparison table, where on the left side (the commercial version) everything is green, and the right side consists of "warning" and "alarm" symbols except for the very first one (essentials). If you read the text next to the symbols, it turns out to be not so bad but the visual impression has been made. But, as said, the web site has become much better in terms of finding the open-source edition of Qt and covering what the open-source edition means. So yes, although I do have a valid Qt account because I have willingly chosen to contribute to Qt, I don't think that TQC will treat the online-installer data with the appropriate confidence. Judging by the TQC marketing trying to obscure the open-source nature of the Qt Framework previously, I would tend to think that the gathered emails will be used to push the commercial version of Qt too aggressively. Firstly, because there is no technical reason to start requiring the accounts in order to download the binaries (we could download the binaries before, without the account). Secondly, I think that this is obvious that the gathered email addresses will be used for marketing and sales. The Qt Company just coerces people to accepting that they will be contacted by the TQC sales. If I want to download the open-source version if Qt, I usually don't want to be bothered by marketing people. Yes, I can download the sources anonymously and compile them, but this is not the way a new user unfamiliar with the Qt framework would prefer. Yes, there are Linux packages without the online installer and Linux users are generally more used to building stuff from source, but there is plenty of Windows developers who like their installers. There are also a lot of students who use Qt at their universities (all of them are new users of Qt!), and they usually learn how things work with other frameworks and technologies, and this is not always in favor of Qt. As already mentioned 100x on this thread, my personal opinion as a private person is that TQC should leave Qt more accessible, instead of putting walls, in order to improve the acceptance and spread the library. Again, as already mentioned, it is hard to find C++ developers, let alone developers familiar with Qt. The Qt Company also wants to earn money, and we all accept and support that, but why not making money by providing first-class support and professional services instead of enormous license costs? Cheers Dmitriy On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 5:10 PM Volker Hilsheimer <volker.hilshei...@qt.io> wrote: > > On 29 Jan 2020, at 15:20, Benjamin TERRIER <b.terr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Wed, 29 Jan 2020 at 14:10, Cristián Maureira-Fredes < > cristian.maureira-fre...@qt.io> wrote: > >> > >> but for Windows/macOS this might have three solutions (maybe more): > >> - Using package managers that provide Qt, > >> - Download and compile Qt by themselves, > >> - Create an account and use the installer. > > > > > > How is any of these a solution to the fact that your a putting a barrier > for new users? > > These are just 3 bad solutions to a problem that did not exist yesterday > and that we have to deal with > > because you removed the 2 main points of entry for new Qt users: the > offline installer and > > the non-privacy-violating online installer. > > Hm, if the problem didn’t exist, then why did the solutions exist? Package > managers on Windows and macOS provide Qt in the past, after all, and > > $ sudo apt-get install -y qtcreator > PS C:\Users\vohi> choco install qtcreator > $ brew install qt-creator > > give me a Qt development environment on Linux, Windows, and macOS. > > > You obviously don’t trust that TQtC will treat the data the > online-installer either demands or requires with the appropriate > confidence. So, shouldn't you build Qt from sources? Your IP address is > PII, after all. Why did you trust that The Qt Company didn’t collect > personal data from you previously - just because you didn’t have to enter > your email address? > > > >> Good thing that you replied in any case, > >> because I really think we should separate the different use cases: > >> > >> - For people already using Qt, with Qt accounts, > >> that's not a problem. > > > > This, and a lot of what TQC employees are saying on these changes, does > sound like the famous sentence > > from Don Mattrick about the Xbox One: "We have a product for people who > aren't able to get some form of connectivity; it's called Xbox 360." > > > > Back to the topic, I have a Qt account, I do NOT want to use it to > install Qt. > > I am pretty sure we will have community provided offline, and even maybe > online, installers soon enough. > > > I wonder where all this love for the Qt installer comes from. I personally > consider “sudo apt-get install -y qtcreator” or “brew install qt-creator” > or “choco install qtcreator" to be vastly superior to using the installer > UI, and very easily integrated in VM provisioning. Any energy spent on > making sure that the versions we get from those package repos is up-to-date > would be worth a lot more (to me) than building another installer. > > > Volker > > > _______________________________________________ > Development mailing list > Development@qt-project.org > https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/development >
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