[Interest] Indie Mobil Program terminated?

Daniel França daniel.franca at gmail.com
Sat Jul 11 11:07:36 CEST 2015


And how about the "professional license"?
On Sat 11 Jul 2015 at 11:04 Attila Csipa <qt at csipa.in.rs> wrote:

> Disclaimer: I don't work or speak for the Qt company. I work(ed) for
> companies using the commercial license.
>
> The problem, as I understood it, was that this majority of Qt developers
> you mention never materialized or went for the indie license. The sales
> suggestion we got indicated that people either used the (L)GPL license
> (legally or not), or went for the "big" commercial one. In retrospect, I
> feel an indie license was something that everybody treated as "I'll buy
> one if my app succeeds" but never did.
>
> Of course, one could argue that it's no extra cost, so it should be
> kept, for PR purposes if nothing else to dampen the price shock of the
> commercial version for prospective developers who now use free tools.
> But there are implications other than the cost of logistics. Doing
> mobile is technically tough, especially the way Qt is doing it, with the
> amount of back-ends (and new OS releases) you need to keep synchronized.
> Having a Qt license helps with your feature/bug requests. What this
> means that this leads to a bit of conflict of interest - serving the
> mainstream mobile developer market is very resource intensive, but
> doesn't generate revenue. Focusing on big customers OTOH allows to have
> good solutions for their use cases and preserves them as paying
> customers. Would then Indie licensees become second-class citizens?
>
> Mobile never was a core area for Qt in the post-Nokia period, and while
> there are good intentions, I'm sure there is a line after which the
> return on investment is really low from a commercial license business
> perspective. Simply put, the core philosophies of Qt are not exactly
> mobile-friendly, and every effort there is an uphill battle (for which
> they are apparently not getting paid enough).
>
> As far as the commercial success of Qt goes, the sad truth is that if
> all these ("potential" customer) developers flocked to competing
> solutions, someone could say (as blunt as it might sound) that they are
> free to not-pay for those solutions as well. I say this specifically as
> these are *commercial* projects we're talking about. These are, by far,
> not FOSS apps that want an exception due to the store license terms, but
> regular apps that (in some form) want to generate income. For Xamarin,
> due to the technical aspects, it's easier to maintain an Indie version
> and there is no conflict of interest with a desktop developer crowd.
> Unity is not really for the same purpose, and Cordova is a very
> different game as well. All the other solutions are a step down for
> someone using Qt in a non-trivial way.
>
> All in all, given the current license numbers hinted, I really feel the
> the existence or lack of a cheap/indie license will not play a major
> role in the success of Qt on mobile.
>
> Best regards,
> Attila
>
> On 7/10/2015 10:03 PM, John C. Turnbull wrote:
> > Well you can continue to discredit all my ideas but the point is that if
> Qt
> > drops the Indie license and makes single developers, small or moderate
> sized
> > businesses pay $350 per month to use Qt, you can pretty much say goodbye
> to
> > the majority of Qt developers and cry tears of blood as they flock to
> > competing products.
> >
> > Somehow, all Qt developers need to get access to the particular features
> and
> > platforms they need (which may be one or two or every feature, device and
> > platform) at a price that they can sustainably afford or they simply
> won't
> > use it.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: interest-bounces+ozemale=ozemail.com.au at qt-project.org
> > [mailto:interest-bounces+ozemale=ozemail.com.au at qt-project.org] On
> Behalf Of
> > Thiago Macieira
> > Sent: Saturday, July 11, 2015 6:43 AM
> > To: interest at qt-project.org
> > Subject: Re: [Interest] Indie Mobil Program terminated?
> >
> > On Saturday 11 July 2015 05:58:19 John C. Turnbull wrote:
> >> That's why you don't charge anywhere near $350/month/developer.
> >> That's the whole problem I am trying to solve.  Most indie, small and
> >> moderate businesses simply can't afford that.
> > But you're not only not solving it, you're making the problem worse by
> > including the commercial licence that big companies would use in the mix.
> > The price of $350/month/developer is not accidental. There's a huge cost
> in
> > supporting the Qt development and support engineers working for an entire
> > year in high cost countries like Germany and Norway.
> >
> >> But if you charge them something much, much less for a commercial
> >> license and then Qt recoups its costs from a small slice of royalties,
> >> everyone is happy!
> > Trust me, it's been tried. Big companies like royalties even less than
> large
> > price tags. An upfront cost is something you can budget for. A cost that
> you
> > won't know until you actually ship devices because it depends on a number
> > you don't know (the shipment volume) is hard to model.
> >
> >> The in-house license would be more expensive per month but would
> >> mostly be used by larger corporations.
> > Except the larger ones that actually sell software or devices.
> >
> > --
> > Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
> >    Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
> >
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