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