 Lastly, I've heard a lot of misinformation about the relationship between QT and KD, especially after the video of BabyWalgway that said that KD is not a community company because it relies on QT, which is proprietary, which isn't true simply. So I wanted to dive in the topic a little bit and I won't pretend that this is like easy to understand. It is a bit complex. I'm doing my best too. But I think it's worth it considering that KD relies on QT a lot. I also get asked often, could KD transition to another toolkit? And Danzor, as far as I know, and I've seen other developers say this way, is not really. It's very, very unfeasible to think of completely switching to a different toolkit, because they are all quite different from what QT does and QT provides a lot that's used by KD. Let's actually talk about QT. First of all, the KD Free QT Foundation, which is a foundation with two members from KD, two members from QT, and in case of time, there's an extra vote as a typebreaker from KD. Hey, small correction here, I said QT and in this case, I actually refer to the QT company and not the QT project. Many people are involved in the QT project without necessarily being employed by the QT company. But in order to be in the free QT, KD Free QT Foundation, from the QT side, you do actually have to be employed in the QT company. And from now on, I'll actually use the word QT to refer both as the QT company sometimes and the QT projects other times and I'm really sorry about that. So keep in mind this correction when you go through the rest of the video. And the goal of this foundation is to make sure that QT remains available for development of free software and especially, of course, KD software. Now one of the most important results of the QT Free QT Foundation is in order to keep there is a relationship stable is of course the software license agreement, which is rather old but has been updated multiple times. This is the latest version, which is 2015-2016. And this is an actual agreement contract with a lot of legal stuff that obviously I go through. I won't go through line by line because it's a lot of legal stuff. But I find that it's nicely explained by this PDF, how the QT Free QT Foundation strength QT, which was actually made by Olaf, which is one of the two members of the KD Free QT Foundation from the part of KD. Now, since this document, some things happened and this is not in the document itself. Number one, QT actually said that this text does not fully represent their views. Okay, they did not give specific suggestions for what to change, but also it has not been updated to what happened in 2020 and we'll get to what happened in 2020. Still, it does give a good overview of what is the agreement. And this I think is one of the most useful graphs. So this is actually, we can also see by this graph, some of the things that changed through time. As an example, originally there was only a couple of platforms here and others weren't supported, but they were later added. And what the agreement says is that essential modules and most add-ons have to be licensed through GPL and LGPL. The difference between GPL and LGPL, again, can be better explained by somebody else, but to give it short in this video, the main difference is that this license can be used for closed source products, meaning that GPL, if you use really something as GPL and paid, you either do something open source and use GPL and actually follow GPL terms or you actually paid a commercial version of QT. Whereas projects with LGPL can also be used for closed source products, sorry. So essential modules and most add-ons should be GPL and LGPL with paid commercial options, of course, which also gives you access to stuff like support, of course. But this applies for all of these platforms and that's not applied for other platforms, but I mean everything's in here. Some add-ons and design and development tools, which should be everything else, can be licensed as GPL, which as the side effect of you have to go and pay for the commercial version if you have a closed source software, of course, and support is paid, but I mean this paid support also applies to many fully community things, so it makes sense. Now, one very important detail in this agreement is that if this is broken in any way, some module is missing, maybe some essential module is missing LGPL as an example, the contract actually gives a delay of up to 12 months to go back and make sure that this is correctly applied. Another couple of places to read about this is the QTFAQ, which talks about a little bit about the history and what you can and cannot do with LGPL and GPL. And also, this is the QT project page, which is not the QT company, but it's actually the project and this governs the open source development of QT. And you can see that there's a varying number of contributors and everybody can make a QT account and do a merge request or I mean submit a patch. We can see here a lot of details on how to contribute to the QT project, which is open governance as KDE is. You can see here some details about this, the governance model. Now, 2020, what happened, what changed in 2020? This is an article that mostly talks about unrelated things, except this one, which is very much important. Now, I've seen a lot of people saying that LTS become proprietary. That didn't quite happen at all. So starting from QT 5.15, I'm used to KDE Plasma 5.25 at this point, the long-term support version of QT will only be available to commercial customers. This means open source users will receive patch lever releases of 5.15 until the next minor release will become available. This does not mean that 5.15 again is only available for commercial customers, but rather that the patch releases to keep it updated are only released for commercial users. Because what LTS means is that patches that were applied to later versions that came out later are backported to an older version of QT, so that if you use 5.15 LTS, you're sure that you will continue to receive updates and bug fixes for a long time, even if newer versions of QT are available. Now, the LTS version of QT is more recent than KDE, so there has been a significant portion of time that where KDE lived without the LTS version of QT, obviously. And even now, it's only used to a little extent within KDE. I think Kubuntu used this in particular. Now, how can they actually do this? The reasoning is they use, again, this little 12 months thing. So what they do isn't actually make all releases after 5.15.x commercial only, but they do it for a year. So they are actually following the agreement by delaying the open source version by 12 months max, because that is what the contract actually allows to up to 12 months. So this is still within the range of possibility that the contract allows. And this is what happened recently. So recently, 5.15.4 was released as open source. And by the way, I'm sorry, I'm using Forenex, but don't use Forenex in general. It's not a good place to get news. But nonetheless, really recently, 5.15.4 was released. And that's because the commercial version of this release was one year ago. So currently for LTS, we are getting patches one year after they're actually published. So to summarize it up, what changes here is that the LTS versions are released immediately. So we do get them, the major release, and when they become LTS. So when a newer one is released and the patches are being backported to 5.15, we do not get those until one year later. So it's not proprietary. It's just that open source is granted until a newer version is out. And then you have to wait one year to get back on track. That's the situation with LTS. Then another thing happened still by Olaf, same member that did this document here, which was worrying. This happened on April 8, 2020. So three months after this announcement. And this was related to Corona. You remember like 2020, what a year. And only through him. So he is the only source of information because publicly, of course, QT never talked about this internal things. Through him, we know that the company informed both the QT EV, which is the organization that represents QT in legal matters. And the QT Free QT Foundation, that the economic outlook, blah, blah, blah. As a result, they are thinking about restricting all QT releases to paid license holders for the first 12 months. They can do that again, because we've seen that the contracts, the contract actually gives them 12 months to get back on track. So they can do this. This is probably like the worst way to follow the contract, because you do follow it, but you make sure that there's as much delay as possible between release of the commercial version and the release of the open source one. Now, if this threat was actually put in place, it wasn't. But if it were, that would have meant that we would have still had an open source version of QT, but one year later compared to the commercial version, which of course rises the question, what should QT do in case this happens? One option is to use QT open source licensing after one year. Another option, which is always available, is to take the latest version of QT that has been released under LGPL and fork it and maintain it. And this was discussed a lot more even so in the community of QT users than developers, even though there has been a lot of discussion back then. And one big question, of course, is would QT be able to maintain a fork of QT? Because let's remember that QT cannot close source everything they have. What has been released as open source will remain open source. They cannot change that. They can change the licensing of future versions as we've seen and they can delay it, but what's open source now will remain it. If it gets forked, then we should remember that QT is not the only organization that actually uses QT. There are others and some of them back then in 2020 actually stood up and said that they would also join an effort to maintain a forked version of QT if it would have been necessary. It hasn't. So this remains a what if, what could have been. Right now there is no necessity. It's not necessary at all to fork QT because they are currently following the contract and only the LTS versions are delayed for one year or the others aren't. So for now there's no need for a fork and we should remember that that forking QT is like the worst case scenario and should be avoided at all costs obviously. But that's currently not the direction we're going to short term at least. This is not the video to try to make predictions. I'm just trying to explain how it's going. Now after all of this what's happening now is a switch to the focus of QT6. QT6 has been released. I don't know if you know that. We're currently at QT6.3 and QT is working on the switch from QT5 to QT6. QT is still QT5. So one of the things that happened with the switch is, let me show this first, the patch collection. So this was actually supported by both the QT company and QT AV and it's a set of patches with security and functional fixes that are applied if I understood this correctly on QT5.15. And there are code changes that were applied later on in newer versions that weren't back ported to QT5.15 that we have as open source and QT is actually maintaining this set of patches. So they follow the same license as the module that they are applied to and by doing this it makes the transition from QT5 to QT6 easier by actually maintaining QT5.15 until we are ready to switch to QT6. So you can see that there is still nice collaboration with QT, the QT company and the free QT foundation is still maintaining that connection and QT is following the contract and has always done that of course with a 12 months delay trick. Another nice article is in Kate's blog and it talks about the switch from QT5 to QT6 which some people called horrible and saying that the QT projects and the company doesn't care for their open source and other users blah blah blah and this article actually goes against that and talks about the transition from QT5 to QT6 saying that it's actually rather easy to switch of course that's rather technical we don't care about this right now in this video and also about the fact that QT developers do care about other projects and as an example of this the merge request that actually helped Kate switch to QT6 or should I say make it possible to compile it with QT6 because the Kate you're using is still QT5 was actually submitted by a QT project contributor and it was not just a throwing code at Katie they actually followed their review made changes according to that and that's how open source open source work so that works most of the QT5 to QT6 transition is for frameworks but again that's another topic for another video not interesting what happens if QT decides to not follow the contract at all there are legal consequences and the the QT3 QT foundation can actually take all of QT's code and release it as whatever license they prefer and this would be quite bad news for QT because it would mean that if you license it as BSD as an example also closed projects that were previously paying QT to actually use the QT code would could just take all of all of the code the entire entirety of it and use it in whatever way they prefer so if QT breaks the contract all of QT code is published under the most permissive license so there is safety from that point of view there are some steps that the QT AV company has to follow before the new license can actually be put into effect that is the foundation have to send a notice to the QT company and only three months later can the foundation actually be entitled to exercise it's right to do the release release signs to apply the new licenses so it's not immediate but if that happens a three months notice is sent and after three months this can actually take effect now this is not the place for me to give my personal opinions about this it's mostly that I saw really a lot of people asking me to clarify what was happening and a lot of misinformation yet again especially done by baby valgue who also claimed that QT cannot be forked that's not how it works so this was the goal of this video personally I would like that at least in this community we stopped we avoided doing rather should I say making the situation appear much much worse than it is and as much as of course these things especially what happened in 2020 do might seem worrying even though nothing came out of it and there is currently a good cooperation with the QT company we should always keep in mind that KD guarantees that everything that you're using under the KD umbrella and that KD relies on is open source and I've seen people saying that maybe they should switch to GNOME to avoid using proprietary QT that's not going to happen KD will never ship based on proprietary QT that's never going to happen so KD is a guarantee that what you're using is free software and I think that's extremely important and they will do whatever it takes to make sure that the code of KD actually stays completely open source and also what KD relies on and that was the video this that we are seeing right now are the patterns and if you would like to help me make these videos and also contribute to KD regarding my patches so like I've just done the floating panel and I'm starting to look around I'm doing some back fixes right now but if you'd like to help me out actually do these videos there is the donation links that will appear shortly on my right which is your left and you can also go to the KD.org webpage and there also a way to donate donate to KD directly so you have the choice and thanks for following along just one message for those who watch a lot of my videos currently the patterns list is wrong I'm sorry about that I'm still updating it I need to change the appearance as well so give me just a little bit of time and I'll make sure that it gets updated so sorry about that