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by toyg 2378 days ago
Trolltech were pretty awesome, in their days. The “poison-pill BSD” setup is pretty smart; if i remember correctly , it was introduced when they started wobbling a bit from the commercial perspective, in order to keep the community calm while they went looking for buyers (which they eventually found in Nokia). It would be sad if the switch had to be triggered at a time when QT is supposed to be “back in the game” after years of uncertainty.

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.
2 comments
Nokinside 2378 days ago
>If you can’t make money from Qt, it’s not because of the license.

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.

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toyg 2378 days ago
That’s good, so why change the license now? Is it just greed?
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Nokinside 2377 days ago
Nobody knows what type of change they want. Their paying customers don't care because the product is double licensed.

I suspect it has something to do with some 3d libraries and code they would like to include, but I don't know.

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pjmlp 2378 days ago
They tried and learned that most FOSS don't want to pay for their tools, so they turned their focus to those that actually care to pay and have been doing quite alright.
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wruza 2378 days ago
Numerous frameworks didn’t even bother to turn to FOSS, and maybe they’re also doing alright. We cannot be sure though, cause no one knows their name.

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).

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pjmlp 2377 days ago
If you want names, OutSystems, Xamarin, VCL, WPF/UWP, Cocoa, UIKit, Telerik, CodenameOne, Gluon,...
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wruza 2377 days ago
That’s lame argument, if it is, and I don’t feel like nitpicking. Almost all of these are either dual-licensed free to use for foss folks or charged very indirectly.

You still cannot be full-commercial and not have sap/oracle-like salesmen squad.

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