[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Kyle Edwards]

On Wed, 2020-01-29 at 08:20 +0100, Elvis Stansvik wrote:
> Just want to add here: Even if CMake is probably the Kitware project
> with the largest number of users if counting developers, I don't
> think
> it's their flagship product. That would be the VTK framework (2500
> classes, 1 MLoC) and associated libraries/applications (ParaView,
> CTK,
> ...). I think Kitware makes most of its money doing
> consulting/projects using those libraries for
> medical/defense/research/HPC. CMake just sort of fell out from their
> development process. So CMake is not the central part to their
> business strategy I think. I think they also employ quite a big of
> domain experts in the fields where they consult (i.e. it's not just
> consulting as "VTK experts").
> 
> If there's a Kitwarer here please correct me if I'm wrong.

Kitwarer here. All of our products are BSD-or-similar licensed and free
to use anonymously if they fit your needs out of the box - no paywalls
or registration for VTK or CMake downloads. And you are of course free
to extend/modify them yourself and contribute them (or not) back to
upstream.

The money we make is by selling support - if our projects don't quite
do what you want, or if you don't want to modify them yourself, you can
pay us to do the work for you. Any of the work that we do on core
frameworks (like VTK) then gets integrated into the mainline project
for everyone else to use (assuming the contract is not under NDA or
other confidentiality requirements.) And yes, we do have domain experts
who work on complex visualization algorithms for VTK.

It is true that CMake started as a means to an end to build and ship
ITK. However, it has since grown into a product of its own, with
numerous customers buying CMake support from us... including TQtC
itself as of recent. I would say that VTK is still Kitware's primary
flagship product, but with ITK, ParaView, and CMake additionally
serving as secondary flagship products.

Kyle