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by kristoffer 2758 days ago
Reasonable? It's about $500 / month / developer with additional royalties if you are shipping devices with Qt firmware. Sure I think Qt/QML is the best UI toolkit available but this crazy pricing is driving me towards any possible alternative. So I'm really hoping Flutter will take off (for desktop/embedded as well, not only mobile).

Note that Qt is GPL3 nowadays so you can't really ship embedded devices with Qt without paying.
2 comments
pjmlp 2758 days ago
A great toolkit like Qt, including Qt Creator and UI designers, doesn't get written during late nights and weekends.

They are pretty cheap considering the typical prices on their target markets, embedded tooling, medical devices, enterprise solutions.

Naturally they decided to pivot to those markets, as Trolltech has hardly seen any significant monetary profit from FOSS.

So it is only fair that those that don't want to pay, also ship code free to the others.

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nottorp 2758 days ago
Actually Trolltech was doing pretty well while selling Qt (which was full GPL at that time) for a fixed price per major version.

Then Nokia bought it and made it LGPL because they were planning on using it as the foundation for (some of) their mobile phones. Unfortunately, they couldn't decide which phones and went on a downwards slide.

Then Microsoft bought most of Nokia, and Qt got spun off into an enterprise thingy that takes their sales tactics from Oracle. Yes, I know the LGPL allows me to link dynamically for free, no, I don't trust Digia not to sue me for that.

Their pricing is also out of reach of anyone who's not in an industry that charges an arm and a leg due to regulation or niche.

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kristoffer 2758 days ago
Most embedded tooling is free nowadays. Free software has eaten the world and will continue to do so.

I will use a free UI toolkit when I can. Qt will kill itself with their current pricing model.

Automotive is moving towards Android. Qt is not good for medical either because it is not really certifiable.

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pjmlp 2758 days ago
Actually what I predict is the return to shareware/public domain models, where the free software is only the tip of the iceberg of the stack one actually needs for production code.

The trend is already visible with SaaS, Cloud, IoT,...

Qt is certainly certified for medical use, https://www.qt.io/qt-in-medical/.

I have hardly seen any big Android Auto adoption.

The biggest foe of Qt in Automotive is Web stack.

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kristoffer 2758 days ago
Ok I'll admit I'm not familiar with medical certification. I know that the so called Qt Safe Renderer for ISO26262 compliance is a bit of a joke at least.

I have seen two very big Qt projects being cancelled due to Android. Not the Android Auto app but native Android for IVI.

I don't see any indication of your vision for shareware. The trend is towards more and more software being licensed under licenses such as MIT.

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pjmlp 2758 days ago
> The trend is towards more and more software being licensed under licenses such as MIT.

Which is exactly my point.

Give the tip of the iceberg for free, charge for everything else and give as little back to upstream, if anything.

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gcb0 2758 days ago
only if there was a startup doing embedded chips with gpl firmware...
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