[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[NIkolai Marchenko]

>  You have absolutely no information on how elastic the Qt commercial
price is, so kindly don't speculate on what price would be good.

Let me pipe in about what people think of Qt's licensing model. I won't
call names but I've been contacted just today by someone who has been
legally bullied by Qt's sales team into purchasing a license for a case
that is completely non obvious. This person is of the opinion that even
using Qt's LGPL license is completely unsafe as it's totally grey area and
claiming that TQtC searches people working with qt on Linkedin and bullies
their companies.

These are not my words, I have no proof, but this is what I got in PMs
today from someone I haven't even talked to before. I am simply passing
along their opinion.

My own opinion: Qt's licensing is super non-obvious and super non-friendly
and the more i learn about it the less desire I have to ever suggest
expanding on LGPL in our company with Qt's business offerings.

On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 11:58 PM Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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