As I see it, leaving Qt entirely at the mercy of it's licensing revenue stream and not supplemented by Digia's consulting revenue stream means 1) Qt needs to sell more licenses going ahead or 2) Qt needs to charge more per license. The cost of doing business or paying developers will not be going down any time soon. It can only be flat or, more likely, up. And I don't see Qt license numbers making a radical change upward in the near future.