[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Filippo Cucchetto]

Qt should find a good balance between licensing costs and investors.
Taking JetBrains as an example of similar (profitable) company you can see
that for a single developer all their tools suite costs 600 euros yearly
decreasing to 400 after 3 years. I think that's a fair price even for a
framework like Qt. Furthermore i think that current LGPL users could be more
willing to buy a commercial company once a good price for them is available
(at that point i would simply turn Qt dual licensing GPL or Commerical
period).
Another point is that a great framework like Qt need some big investors
that are willing to use Qt for their ecosystem. We don't have big
informations onthis
area but maybe the partnership with LG or with one or more company in the
automotive field can give a stable flow of cash.
In conclusion a 400 euro per developer/year is a nice spot for converting
most LGPL users to Commercial.

F.

Il giorno mer 29 gen 2020 alle ore 08:30 Mathias Hasselmann <
mathias at taschenorakel.de> ha scritto:

> Am 27.01.2020 um 15:34 schrieb Lars Knoll:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > The Qt Company has done some adjustments to the Qt will be offered in
> the future. Please check out
> https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020 .
> >
> > The change consists of three parts.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > The second change is that a Qt Account will be in the future required
> for binary packages. Source code will continue to be available as
> currently. This will simplify distribution and integration with the
> Marketplace. In addition, we want open source users to contribute to Qt or
> the Qt ecosystem. Doing so is only possible with a valid Qt Account (Jira,
> code review and the forums all require a Qt Account).
>
> Are you really sure that it is a good idea to raise the entry barrier
> for trying Qt that much? Personally I only register for software that I
> am conviced I'll keep using. If it requires such registration directly
> at download or during installation already it doesn't even get
> downloaded or installed. Such attitude might seem strange in the times
> of Android, iOS, Windows 10 S, but keep in mind that your customers
> aren't the typicial computer illiterated that simply accept any nonsense
> you do to their privacy, you are targeting computer experts.
>
> BBC Wales just sketched pretty well the rude attitude you are embracing
> with that change: https://twitter.com/Uehmche/status/1217004373970161664
>
> Besides both that barrier combined with that change to LTS releases will
> just teach more people to build and patch Qt from source. Being used to
> that process, having established that process just largely reduces
> motivation to pay for Qt.
>
> Ciao
> Mathias
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>


-- 
Filippo Cucchetto
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