[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Richard Weickelt]

>> Maybe you all have great ideas that we missed though. What kind of change do
>> you think would give companies a really good reason to buy a license, without
>> at the same time hurting the community?

I wonder if selling per-developer licenses is still a sustainable business model at all. We are living in times where big players are pressing their frameworks into the market, being backed up by more developers than the Qt company will ever have. It's hard to compete and make money. Maybe the Qt company should close the doors and be turned into a foundation running the infrastructure behind qt-project.org and coordinate further development. For the benefit of Qt and in order to prevent forks. Just kidding.

> 1. Work on making Qt more relevant. For me this means bringing QML to the web.
> Obviously tQtC will have to determine those priorities.
> 2. Don’t scare people off before they even start. Much lower initial pricing,
> no historical licensing, more distant ramps for price increases.
> 3. Focus on getting people/companies to make multi person-year investments in
> Qt-based projects — it is only these projects that can stomach high license
> fees.

4. A more attractive overall end-to-end development package. 
After downloading the Qt SDK and QtCreator there is still a lot of work to do until you have an application that you can deploy with confidence. I am not talking about writing the actual code. Especially automating the build/test/deployment part of multi-platform project eats up a lot of resources, is full of pitfalls and this can be real bummer if you're just a small company or the Qt application is not your core product. Did I already mention that a Qbs-alike language would have been a great use-case for pipeline infrastructure? Even big companies are burning lots of manpower in that task and still often don't get it right. If paying a predictive and non-hurting amount of money would allow me to focus on my actual product, I might most likely do it. Felgo has entered that direction only last year, but I don't know how their solution sells though. Maybe it's too late for Qt to invest in that area.

5. Make contributions more attractive and rewarding and allow contributors to actually get something out of it.
- Getting a +2 on a S,M,L,XL sized patch gives credits.
- Fixing an issue that was confirmed to be an issue gives credits.
- Answering a question in the Qt forum gives credits.
- Credits can be used for upgrading Qt online services described in 4.
- Credits can be put on issues.
- Credits can be converted into money.
- Customers buying a license would get access to business support, but also get some credits automatically.
- Everybody could buy credits
- The exchange rate of credits/money depends on supply and demand

In addition, there would be a public, but very visible reputation system which only accounts for contributions (in any form in the Qt project).