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by moron4hire 3308 days ago
What suggestion would you make for them to be able to make a living off of open source software?

EDIT: also, it's LGPL or $80/developer-month, not and. I don't see anything about royalties. And considering the GPL doesn't apply until you start distributing the software, you don't need to spend that money during development. You can wait to license when you release and start getting revenue.
3 comments
gcp 3308 days ago
I don't see anything about royalties.

That's for Qt for Devices. Conditions aren't public, but: "To learn about Qt for Device Creation pricing – developer licenses and embedded device distribution fees – start the conversation now"

also, it's LGPL or $80/developer-month, not and.

It's actually more like $300/dev/month unless you qualify as a startup.

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cannam 3308 days ago
I don't know whether this has changed, but they used to forbid you from developing with the open source edition and then releasing under a commercial licence. (They did this with a term in the commercial licence that specified that it couldn't be used with code previously developed with the open source edition.)

This was quite a confusing policy in some ways. I think in practice they expected to resolve such situations by backdating payments for the commercial licence to cover the development period.

(Edit: from https://www.qt.io/faq/#_Toc_3_13 it looks like the policy is unchanged but the wording around it has been softened a bit to encourage negotiation)

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bluGill 3308 days ago
That is the license terms, but so long as you haven't distributed it before you go to sales and explain the situation they are willing to come to an agreement. Probably this means you pay for all the license term you should have. Something to that effect is even on their pages if you dig around.

The important part is once you realize you have the wrong license you contact sales admit your mistake and make a good faith effort to correct things.

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jononor 3308 days ago
3.13 (and 3.12) sounds primarily for avoiding that a company has 30 developers with only the 1 developer (or CI bot) that does the release having a Qt commercial license.

Or that you develop for 12 months and get a commercial license the last month,, when its going to be released.

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joezydeco 3308 days ago
Royalties are way high compared to some of the other mature commercial toolkits out there (like Altia or VAPS).

Last time we quoted for our smallish product (1-2K EAU), Qt wanted $5 or $6/unit, purchased in blocks of 1,000 licenses at a time. That was too much of a hit on our BOM, so we went LGPL and haven't looked back.

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