[Interest] Qt Creator licensing for companies with Qt, Commercial developers

[Roland Hughes]

On 4/3/20 6:11 AM, Christian Gagneraud wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Apr 2020 at 19:09, Roland Hughes <roland at logikalsolutions.com> wrote:
>> No, that was never the point of this thread.
> Me too:
>
> My first 'commercial' Android app, made with 'pure' commercial Qt SDK,
> produced its first crash report:
> ----
> 04-03 11:30:53.384 17079 17115 E AndroidRuntime: Process:
> org.qtproject.example.TestApp, PID: XXXX
> 04-03 11:30:53.384 17079 17115 E AndroidRuntime:
> java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: dlopen failed:
> /lib/arm/libc++_static.so" has bad ELF magic
> ----
>
> The point is not about the crash itself, that was my mistake.
>
> The point is:
> I used a 'commercial only' Qt license to produce an Android app, and
> the first thing this app says starts with 'org.qtproject', not
> 'com.foobarbaz'.
>
> I hope you'll find this detail funny!
>
> Chris, NZ, day#8
>
> PS: Please don't ignore people with dual licensed Qt installs

I find "has bad ELF magic" a bit funnier.

Well I hope you didn't use doxygen for your documentation when using 
your commercial license. It seems you can't use anything built with 
OpenSource Qt when using the commercially licensed version.

At this point the only real solution is to never buy a license.

Royalties always were a wretched idea in the software world. They 
basically put every company out of business that tried them. I will say 
this though, no software company in the 1980s through the 1990s, the 
period where stupid companies trying royalties got purged from the 
software industry, NONE of them had the bitter ex-wife view of alimony 
Qt has.

They aren't satisfied with ransoming the children. (Royalties)

They want to be paid for the time you were dating. (Back licensing)

They want to be paid for the time you were dating someone else before 
asking them out. (Back licensing)

If you stop paying they off the children. (Forced to remove from stores).

SUCH A DEAL!

The OpenSource world doesn't tolerate licensing. It tolerates support 
contracts. It tolerates subscriptions. It even tolerates marketing. It 
never tolerates royalties.

Now, if Qt company was enhancing QtCreator in ways that weren't released 
to the OpenSource world they could easily set up a subscription service 
much like UltraEdit has

https://www.ultraedit.com/

charging, say $50/yr. Businesses and people would pay that. Many private 
developers would subscribe if this version was better than the 
OpenSource. Especially if QtCreator subscription version had language 
support packages for a good many "other" languages especially the non-PC 
ones. VSI had to build a VMS IDE plugin for VSCodium because there 
wasn't anything out there and the x86 port of VMS is coming out.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VMSSoftwareInc.vms-ide

Of course, "yet another IDE" is coming late to the party. Three years 
ago it would have been a good idea. Could have established a market. 
With Eclipse and VSCodium and UltraEdit, too much market has been 
established now.

They could sell support contracts much like Canonical does for the 
various Ubuntu flavors, businesses pay for those.

Businesses that will still be in business two years from now don't pay 
royalties.

As an aside during this conversation, someone reached out to me about 
converting a C++/Qt project to Rust just this week. I expect many more 
such emails.

OpenSource doesn't tolerate licenses. When you try to license the 
community moves on to a different project. I honestly don't know if 
there is time to save Qt as a project. News of this licensing stuff has 
spread far and wide. Qt is banned from being suggested in a lot of 
places now.

-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com
http://www.infiniteexposure.net
http://www.johnsmith-book.com
http://www.logikalblog.com
http://www.interestingauthors.com/blog