[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Christian Gagneraud]

On Thu, 30 Jan 2020 at 13:01, Oswald Buddenhagen
<oswald.buddenhagen at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 11:40:46PM +0100, Filippo Cucchetto wrote:
> >Maybe you didn't get it but i meant to both put a reasonable price for
> >a commercial license (500$) and turning everything GPL or commercial.
> >Making everything GPL forces all LGPL to buy a commercial license. This
> >obviously could turn away some people but only if there isn't a proper
> >offer for the commercial license.
> >
> that's a fine plan and i assure you that tqtc management would *love* to
> do at least the gpl part (not sure they'd have the wisdom to lower the
> prices and properly reward contributors, though).
>
> unfortunately, this won't work unless kde agrees that the only moral
> thing to do would be allowing tqtc to restore the pre-nokia gpl
> licensing, given that tqtc is in pretty much the same position as
> trolltech was. of course, tqtc has a much less likable and trustworthy
> management, but in their defense, they are also a bit desperate to
> satisfy their greedy shareholders. capitalism rocks, huh?
>
> (going gpl-only would inevitably lead to a fork, but if we assume
> appropriate licensing cost of upstream, that fork would be driven by
> people who are unable or unwilling to invest (time or money), plus a few
> idealists. that would make it pretty much an LTS branch, and thus not
> pose a serious threat to tqtc's business. at least that's my hypothesis.

10 years ago or so, I was working for a small (tiny) company, I wanted
to use Qt for a new project.
Back in these days, Qt was GPL only, and as i was doing proprietary
SW, I had to reject that idea.
Buying a license was a no-go (for whatever reason, this was not my business).
So I ended up reinvented the wheel (thread, network, byte/text processing, ...).

I would see Qt-GPL-only as a regression. I understand that tqtc needs
to make money, no problem with that.
But I'm not convinced that GPL-only will actually work as intended
(bring more user/money) as illustrated above.

My 2 cents,
Chris