[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Cristián Maureira-Fredes]

On 1/29/20 2:27 PM, Kyle Edwards via Development wrote:
> 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

Hey Kyle,

thanks for your answer,
out of curiosity, are there some past business models
that failed inside Kitware? or it has been support only since
the beginning?

What I'm trying to find out is that if maybe some aspects of what
you tried, could be similar of what TQtC is trying now,
so we have more information regarding the positive and negative
aspects of such decisions.

Best


-- 
Dr. Cristián Maureira-Fredes
R&D Manager

The Qt Company GmbH
Erich-Thilo-Straße 10
D-12489 Berlin
https://qt.io