Changing Qt Account to be Optional in the Online Installer

Thanks for your feedback to the new online installer asking for a Qt Account signup. We have evaluated the feedback received via the blog, various discussion forums, irc and other channels. Based on all these comments and discussions with our partners we realize that this was not our finest moment. Preventing the growth and usage of Qt in the open source community is not what we want to happen. We did already see a nice jump in the number of Qt Accounts, but it was never our intention to make our valued community and contributors upset with us or stop using and contributing to Qt. We clearly ill-calculated how asking for a Qt Account with the online installer would make our users feel. A mistake. Sincere apologies.

Based on your feedback, we will remove the enforced Qt Account requirement for open source downloads. Instead, we will make it optional. Users can proceed to download by opting out of creating a Qt Account. Just like before, the commercial users need to provide their Qt Account so that we can point them to the additional content and commercial versions of Qt. We very much hope that we will see also many open-source users creating Qt Accounts either when installing Qt, or via qt.io.

The installer team is already looking at making this change, and we hope that an update can be rolled out next week. Even though the change may look small there is quite many things that we always need to verify before we roll out an update to production. So, please bear with us while we are implementing the change.

We will continue to develop our plans of bringing integrated services to Qt via the Qt Account. Next we are aiming to provide a single sign-on solution through the Qt Account to all our services (forums, wiki, bug reporting, customer portal, etc). Some of the services already leverage Qt Account for sign-on and new services will follow in the coming months. We are committed to developing Qt Account further and want to make it valuable for all users of Qt.

We do hope that this eases your concerns, and that we can continue with your trust. The open source community is what Qt is built on and we value your efforts and feedback greatly. We are very happy to have an active ecosystem around Qt and appreciate the dialogue. So, thanks again for your feedback, discussions and for guiding us in this tough endeavor. We are glad that we have a lot of passion for Qt and for its ongoing greatness in the community.