Woah, I had no idea about this. I wonder what kind of new changes would take place if Qt were BSD licensed, such as languages like D embedding it as a solution for UIs as part of the standard library (they already do this for SQLite and Curl).
I doubt anyone in OSS communities is seriously deterred from using Qt because of the LGPL. It’s just a very big and very complex project that requires a lot of manpower to “tame”.
I guess you do make a fair point in regards to the LGPL though.
[0]: Here's an example of someone building only a minimal amount of Qt: https://github.com/dirtycold/qt-minimal-build
https://dlang.org/phobos/etc_c_sqlite3.html
For anybody's reference, it also has zlib, and an ODBC library.
First, the core can be licensed under Commercial or LGPL licensing. This let's non-paying developers use the core in commercial software. This policy was established to ensure trust with the community during one of the many company transitions. For all new modules, Qt evades that requirement by licensing under Commercial or GPL. I have mixed feelings on this.
Second and more importantly, they have started sending aggressive audit letters to customers. I guess that makes sense from a bean-counter point of view where you poke the customer and try to get them to buy more licenses either because the customer actually needs the licenses, or because the customer is afraid to let any dev work without paying protection money. This is a huge pain in the neck for me as a paying customer. They even sent the aggressive audit letter to an old license we have that had not been renewed (or used) in around a decade.
I'll definitely be rethinking my relationship as a customer when the next renewal comes up.
Businesses will shovel loads of money into SaaS and cloud hosting without blinking, but support a programming tool? Never! Another hundred Office users and 50 more AWS VMs? No problem.
People will spend $10 on a coffee but would never spend $5 to support a project that saves them hundreds or thousands of hours of work. They'll spend $15/month to host a site, but would never pay for the software that runs it even though that took far more effort than racking up some servers.
No wonder everything is surveillanceware and mega-corp silos. We get what we pay for, or rather we don't get what we won't pay for... like independent software.
Avoiding the "out" makes me not want to make use of the new modules. And the hassle of audits makes be question the cost of the inconvenience to me, the dev, of having a license.
It's tradeoffs all the way down.
FOSS made it fashionable to want to be paid for work, while refusing to pay for the work of others, and in the process using clunky tools.
Naturally upstream cannot pay bills from PR and eventually moves on.
I think (could be wrong) you meant to imply closed-source, as one can have commercial open-source software.
I’m not a huge fan of them using GPL for their newer modules, either, like charts. It seemed a bit unnecessary other than driving those who don’t like/can’t use the GPL license into a dev subscription.
Unlike Nokia, which bought Qt and opened it to a more liberal license (LGPLv2.1) because it saw it as a strategic platform basis to attract developers to its platform (that is, until the MS shill Elop was injected as Nokia's CEO and destroyed the company… and sold Qt off)…
… unlike Nokia, the Digia-owned "Qt Company" (now publicly traded as QT-COM on Nasdaq Helsinki) sees Qt as a direct revenue source to monetize to the maximum and developers as milk cows to maximally squeeze out as long as possible. And unlike Nokia, Digia's "Qt Company" does so in a quite unsustainable way. They enormously increased the prices of commercial licenses to a level that can only be qualified as extortion, and they do whatever possible to force developers out of LGPL and into Pay-to-Play:
they switched Qt's open source edition from LGPLv2.1 to LGPLv3… and they switched from LGPL to GPL or commercial only for most new modules, including QtQuick 3D.
The bottom line is: it's really going down the drain, and lots of developers of Qt-based programs and apps are drawn away and looking for something new. The need for a new modern and more liberally licensed cross-platform UI lib is bigger than ever.
Also, many devs are even switching out of Qt-based cross-platform development and back to separate codebases for OS-dependent native UI toolkits… which is kinda sad, though partly alleviated by some other factors (such as the similarities between Swift and Kotlin)
It is hard to sustain a business out of donations and patreons, not everyone enjoys counting pennies every month.
Also Qt is doing pretty well, thanks to enterprises, which still seem to value paying for developer tooling.
Btw. Your claim that developers are switching is not true either. Qt use is increasing and it shows in the number of buying customers.
As if that was of any relevance to the question whether many Qt developers are switching. Given that commercial licenses are only used by a very small minority of the professional developers using Qt (most using open source Qt), themselves only a subset of all developers using Qt… the fact that that small minority is currently increasing while remaining a small minority… doesn't say anything about the proportion of still Qt using developers switching away.
Besides, the sustainability of a temporary increase of that minority is highly questionable. Of course QTCOM's pressure towards Pay-to-Play temporarily forces some of those who are still tied by all of their still-Qt-based code to buy Qt licenses as long as they haven't finished switching to a better alternative… but on the long term most of them quit too. Precisely because of that.
We'll see how that strategy of maximal monetization and maximally squeezing developers works out for QTCOM in the long term
Here some figures: Nokia bought Trolltech and thus the intellectual property of Qt 4 for around 100 million Euros, and then released it to the public under LGPL. Nokia also payed for the development of Qt 4.4 to 5.0, and then "sold" everything to Digia for a piece of bread (about 4 Mio Euros). The contribution rate of Nokia was ~80% according to commit logs; the contribution rate of The Qt Company is at ~40% - and it's mostly on stuff important to them (i.e. which they can sell). So at least 50% are open source contributions by others. This information is all publicly available; you can read it yourself. So the Qt Company massively profited from this and should stop complaining and turning crooked things.
And they have to stop their u-boats, which act anonymously and make opinion.
Is that the regular license FUD or what? I don't see which 3D module you're talking about.
[1] https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html
Dear Qt owners, don’t mess around. If you can’t make money from Qt, it’s not because of the license. Build more bridges, and more developers will come to you.
QT stock is up 124% this year, +247,06% last 3 years.
Qt has de facto monopoly in embedded, medical, automotive, appliance and industry automation. It works in Embedded Linux, INTEGRITY, QNX, and VxWorks.
Qt just launched Qt for MCUs (bare metal toolkit for low end microcontrollers). It runs on Cortex-M with several different 2D accelerators. It's yet another market with no serious competitors.
The point of going foss, in my long-distance bystander observation, is to create an essential part of the market: skilled developers. Not to push your sales to everyone’s face, nor to whine that deals are too cheap. Foss folks will never pay, because they are not business for client, they are people for people (who work for business and sometimes make tech decisions based on a weekend experience).
I think this is the reason of the timing of this post.
Because else, this post is just reminding the existing contracts around Qt.
Ironically, RedHat themselves sometimes make an exception, like the first link mentions:
> We reluctantly sign tolerable upstream project CLAs out of practical necessity.
Red-Hat is the biggest employer of Gtk/GNOME devs, so...
SuSE and Mandrake were historical the biggest ones that cared about KDE.
Just some advice: public consensus is that if you don't want the bleeding edge of KDE, Kubuntu is basically just as good (KDE over Ubuntu) and reportedly is more compatible with various hardware — so if your laptop has issues with Neon, try Kubuntu as a nearly identical alternative.
Note that you can get KDE on any major distro, e.g. Fedora, Arch. I can't recommend it enough, KDE is the dream DE — great out-of-the-box, but settings for pretty much everything, set each once and then forget it as it gets out of your way without sacrificing any feature whatsoever. There are a few minor glitches, but much less so than Gnome or MacOS or Win 10 in my anecdotal experience (notwithstanding display support, that's driver-related and whole other ballgame).
Disclaimer: I package the KDE software stack for another distribution (openSUSE).
