[Interest] Digia to acquire Qt from Nokia

[Atlant Schmidt]

Konrad:

> Wrong: it decreases the direct sales value, but
> hugely increases the use value and with that the
> indirect sales value.

  And the "indirect sales value" matters not a
  whit to the owner of the software (or the
  shareholders of the owner) unless the owner
  is actively reaping a significant fraction
  of that "indirect sales value" (which Nokia
  wasn't).

  I'm sorry; the FOSS folks have argued for years
  that they have a workable financial model but
  I see no evidence that this is true for anything
  other than individuals and relatively small-scale
  commercial operations.


> LGPL'ing Qt also opened a major backdoor for it: you
> can safely introduce it in any project where there are
> no major reasons against it

  Unfortunately, as has already been mentioned by several
  other folks, the fact that a given piece of software is
  licensed under the terms of the (L)GPL is a huge factor
  arguing against its use in several industries. The more-
  open licenses (BSD, MIT, etc.) are free from the large
  burdens that (L)GPL imposes for disclosure, upgrade-
  ability, extensive ongoing code analysis, and the like.

                            Atlant

-----Original Message-----
From: interest-bounces+aschmidt=dekaresearch.com at qt-project.org [mailto:interest-bounces+aschmidt=dekaresearch.com at qt-project.org] On Behalf Of Konrad Rosenbaum
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2012 5:02 AM
To: interest at qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Interest] Digia to acquire Qt from Nokia

Hi,

On Tuesday 14 August 2012 17:47:37 Atlant Schmidt wrote:
> Chuck:
> > Adding LGPL as a license option had an enormous impact on the
> > commercial business but it also grew the number of users by an order
> > of magnitude over the same time period.
>
>   But all of those new LGPL users were *NOT* paying to
>   use Qt (except for those that bought support contracts).

Correct, but that does not matter!

>   An enormous-but-non-paying user base still supports
>   my argument that going FOSS decreases the commercial
>   value of a software property.

Wrong: it decreases the direct sales value, but hugely increases the use value and with that the indirect sales value.

Whether this is a problem or a desired outcome depends on your business model:
do you sell software and then forget about it (like Microsoft, Adobe, etc.) or do you offer paid support (the other nine tenth of the industry)?

See "The Magic Cauldron"[1], specifically section 9 [2].

You'll find Nokias business model in regards to Qt under "Widget Frosting"
(make Nokia phones more attractive for developers) and Trolltechs and Digias under "Give Away the Recipe, Open a Restaurant" (grow a user base, then extract money by being better at supporting it than anybody else could hope to be).

Even if a lot of commercial licensees went LGPL, many of them still need support of some kind. So it's not a complete loss - it is just a shift in business models.

LGPL'ing Qt also opened a major backdoor for it: you can safely introduce it in any project where there are no major reasons against it. Eventually this will generate some support income that would otherwise have been spent on another framework vendor.


[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/magic-cauldron/
[2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/magic-cauldron/ar01s09.html



        Konrad


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