[Rochus]

> makes me think the future of Qt for non-commercial projects is rather bleak

No reason for that. Qt is available under LGPL and GPL. This cannot be changed retroactively and even today a large fraction of the commits comes from the community. There is no reason to believe that this will change.

Qt is used by so many projects that there will always be someone to provide the necessary patches. But it doesn't need that many patches because the code is already so mature and proven. I have several projects that are still based on Qt 4.4 or 4.8, for which there have been no patches for a long time. If something doesn't work well, I usually find a workaround without changing Qt.