[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[coroberti .]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 11:55 AM Konstantin Shegunov
<kshegunov at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 4:36 PM Lars Knoll <lars.knoll at qt.io> wrote:
>>
>> One is a change in policy regarding the LTS releases, where the LTS part of a release is in the future going to be restricted to commercial customers. All bug fixes will (as agreed on the Qt Contributor Summit) go into dev first. Backporting bug fixes is something that the Qt Company will take care of for these LTS branches. We’ve seen over the past that LTS support is something mainly required by large companies, and should hopefully help us get some more commercial support for developing Qt further.
>
>
> This all sounds like a spanking for the LGPL users, and it really is. Leaves a really bad aftertaste, especially for those that actively try to give something back (even if it's a small something) as a "compensation" for using the LGPL license. I don't think anyone would be against bigger businesses pitching in more into development (moneywise), but as a one-man-show the feel is that I've been penalized for not paying the rather insane license fee.
>
>> The third change is that The Qt Company will in the future also offer a lower priced product for small businesses. That small business product is btw not limited to mobile like the one Digia had some years ago, but covers all of Qt for Device Creation.
>
>
> I see a couple of issues here. Firstly, 100k/year *turnover* isn't a small business, that's a nano-company (i.e. 1-2 devs max) and if they're providing a device alongside the software that 100k is going to be eaten in no time. Notice we are not talking profit here, but raw revenue. Whoever from sales came up with that number, really did a botched up job with it. On that note, even if we accept that it's applicable, the straightforward math shows you want to bill 0.5% - 2.5% of the total turnover, so while this sounds good initially it really isn't that shiny when you crunch the numbers. That offering is stillborn from my point of view.

Agree with Konstantin that the definition of a small business isn't realistic.
The realistic one is up to 5 developers and up 500k/year USD sales.

Qt-company may wish to look at the past experience with its failed
tiny-license and mobile-license.
You cannot get from such companies more than 500 greens a year, and
300 is even more realistic.

Personally, I've convinced management to pay 25 USD/month for the
Mobile license to support Qt-development, but
we never used the license and continued open-source. At a certain
point the charges have stopped with an insane offer and insane
pricing.

So, hello, Qt-company, and consider to make something really friendly
for small businesses since we are flexible
and really not locked to your offering.

Kind regards,
Robert