[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday, 29 January 2020 00:25:22 PST Filippo Cucchetto wrote:
> 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. 

Just because it seems like a good price for you doesn't mean it's a good 
price. Reducing the licence price to one tenth what it is today could mean the 
revenues for the company reduce to one tenth too, which means the development 
team might need to reduce to around one tenth what it is. For a licence one 
tenth what it is today, you have to prove that sales would be ten times bigger 
or more. Do you have such proof?

You have absolutely no information on how elastic the Qt commercial price is, 
so kindly don't speculate on what price would be good. The only entity that is 
close to having that information is the one doing Qt sales in the first place 
and even then I don't know they know very well.

> 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).

No, they aren't. Just see that someone else posted on this thread that they 
were paying for a year and then decided to stop doing so because they weren't 
using the licence or support. That's the big issue: why keep paying for 
something you're also getting for free? Companies don't pay out of the 
goodness of their hearts.

> 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.

What makes you think that the automotive field isn't exactly the worst field, 
using Qt in a large set of devices and not contributing code nor paying for 
commercial?

And how do you convince them to pay more? You have to give them something they 
want and wouldn't otherwise get for free. Like a release supported for a big 
number of years. At least for the automotive industry, allergic to the 
(L)GPLv3 as it is, there's one other: the incentive of a licence that doesn't 
have the TiVo clause.

> In conclusion a 400 euro per developer/year is a nice spot for converting
> most LGPL users to Commercial.

Conclusion based on opinion, not data. Sorry, this is not how it works.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel System Software Products