Tuukka Turunen, Director of Development at the Qt Company, announced about restricting access to the source repository of the LTS branch of Qt 5.15, released last May. The limitation was introduced in accordance with the plan announced a year ago, which implies public publication of the code of changes in LTS branches only before the next significant release is formed.
Qt 6.0 was released in December, the code of which remains available and the first corrective update 6.0.1 is expected to be published in the coming days. Starting from January 5, only owners of a commercial license will be able to access the code with updates for the Qt 5.15 branch. Public access to all previously published Qt 5.15 branches will be preserved, but new commits will be added behind closed doors.
An exception is made only for the code of the Qt WebEngine and Qt Script modules, which are linked to external dependencies under the LGPL license.
A patch release of Qt 5.15.3 is scheduled to be published in February for commercial users only. The Qt Company has expressed its willingness, upon request, to provide maintainers of external Qt modules with access to private repositories, which will give community members the opportunity to observe changes in Qt 5.15 LTS. Bug fixes and vulnerabilities can also be ported from dev branch where new Qt releases are developed. As a rule, patches first appear in this branch, after which they are transferred to branches with stable releases.
Support for the previous LTS branch Qt 5.12 will run until the end of 2021. Distributions that need to ship packages with Qt 5.15 will be forced to maintain the branch themselves or switch to the Qt 6 branch, which does not guarantee full compatibility with Qt 5. The Qt maintainers in Debian have previously stated that they will not have enough time to support Qt 6 in the distribution. It is not excluded that the community will create a joint project to organize support for their own LTS branches of Qt, independent of the Qt Company.