>> The Qt Company is proud to be committed to its customers, open source, and the Qt governance model.

Bull.

From January (eg ~2.5 months ago) they've stopped people being able to download the Open Source Windows, macOS, and Linux versions of Qt without first signing up for a "Qt Account".

eg you're now required to be tracked / able to be spammed / (etc) for even the OSS version of Qt.

That's not how companies "committed to Open Source" do things. :(

The crap they're reported as wanting to do now, is right in line with their demonstrated anti-OSS direction.

That's FUD.

It's in virtually every Linux distribution as binary and source. You don't need a "Qt Account".

It's not FUD.

Grab the official Qt installer, and try downloading anything:

http://download.qt.io/official_releases/online_installers/

It will not work unless you sign in with a Qt Account.

Not sure about online installers and not keen to find out, but I just built a Qt app last month and used the offline Windows installer for 5.14 from qt.io as part of the Windows build environment setup, and I’m sure I don’t have a Qt account (yeah checked in my password manager), so saying the open source Qt builds can’t be installed without an account is not accurate.

Thanks. That might be a workable avenue.

Hopefully having several offline installs of various versions in parallel doesn't cause problems.

They can only do that for the packages they build themselves, which are mainly useful to enterprise customers.

Qt being under LGPL, there is nothing that prevents anyone else from redistributing open-source builds of Qt - Debian / Ubuntu through apt, MSYS2 (pacman -S mingw-w64-qt5-whatever), homebrew (brew install qt), conan (conan install qt/5.14.0@bincrafters/stable), vcpkg (vcpkg install qt5)...

Sure. But 99% of people use those packages. Not sure why you say they're only useful for enterprise customers, as they're literally the reference packages. :)

On Linux/BSD though, obviously most people use the in-built package managers where the Qt version is recent enough for their purposes.

I took qt-unified-linux-x86-2.0.5-2-online.run, launched, pressed "Skip" when it was asking for the account, and it's downloading.

Have you tried it? Does it ask after the download?

That's weird. That launcher version you have is version 2.0.5-2. They retired the 2.x series a while back, and it's up to version 3.2.x now which will not work without a Qt account. :(

Oh it looks like you obtained that launcher from the old "archives" directory?

http://download.qt.io/archive/online_installers/2.0/

It's unfortunate that only has an old Linux installer. Saw it yesterday, but needed an OSX downloader and was out of luck. :(

I also always pressed "Skip" on the Qt Creator standalone installer for Linux. But the Skip button doesn't exist any more.

The offline installers seem to work:

http://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/

At least, after disconnecting the internet connection then ignoring the subsequent error (ironic for an "offline" installer!), it doesn't require a Qt account.

That's exactly what I ended up doing, but I hope we'll agree having to do tricks like that in order to use an installer is not... ideal

Very much agree.

For now we (sqlitebrowser.org) will keep with the easy approach of using the official Qt installers.

If Qt does something even further dumb though, we'll likely move to compiling Qt ourselves. And probably then make installers (.msi/.dmg) for anyone else that wants it too. ;)

They're not saying anything definitive. It's just a move to try and avoid bad PR.

Would it even increase their short-term revenue? Users who use the FOSS licence will just wait for the next release, won't they? Unless it's urgent that they use the latest Qt, why would they pay up?

Beats me, I'm certainly not dying to upgrade to Qt6. Now, it will be a nuisance if they withhold security patches for a year, though, so maybe that's what they're counting on? Holding security patches ransom?