Just over a year ago, Qt Company He launched a version of its software that was commercial only and its source code was not accessible. It seems strange in something that is used a lot in Linux, but we already know that not everything is open source or free, even though we are using a kernel-based operating system developed by Linus Torvalds. Well, a year after releasing the third point update of that, the company has released a Qt 5.15.3LTS which is more familiar to us.
It is not that we know much more about this Qt 5.15.3 LTS than the previous one, or well, the truth is that we do, because this version is from open source. This has been announced in a release note rather short in which we basically see the headline «[Development] Open source Qt 5.15.3 released» from where we can download the source code (from here o here) and that links us to last year's note in which he explains something else.
You can now make free use of Qt 5.15.3
Qt 5.15.3 is released fixing more than 200 bugs in what was and is an LTS version of the software. That it was only commercial worried users, who came to think that they could never use Qt 6. Qt 5.15.8 LTS is the latest LTS version, a version that has not yet reached everyone because it is not yet open source. Rumors say that it will be open source in January 2023.
Not being able to install new versions of Qt as soon as they come out isn't all bad news. Many versions of Plasma depend on a specific version of Qt, so Kubuntu users who use the KDE Backports repository can spend months without being able to install a new version of their graphical environment, but the truth is that many of us would prefer that the things were different.
In any case, Qt 5.15.3 LTS is already open source and can now be used freely on any Linux distribution.