[cjensen]

The behavior of the Qt company lately is a bit troubling.

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.

[api]

Its weird what people and businesses will and will not support.

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.

[cjensen]

Sure. In the case of Qt, it was very expensive but well worth paying for because it does a good job. The LGPL stuff is important because it provides us with an "out" if the Qt company goes crazy with prices.

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.

[Rochus]

It's outrageously expensive. And you can't just buy what you really need, just all or nothing. In many projects I only need Qt Core; for that I would have to buy a license for everything from these people with a far worse contract than LGPL and pay royalties. No thanks.

[pjmlp]

Exactly, that is why you can only have nice tools when working for big corps.

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.

[api]

I wouldn't take it that far, but IMHO the free (as in beer) part needs to be questioned at least when it comes to for-profit commercial uses of software.

I'd like software to be free and open source for people and academic or non-profit uses, but I would like it if corporations for their use if they are using them in certain ways. Particularly problematic is the use of FOSS to power closed SaaS.

ZeroTier (of which I am the founder) just adopted the BSL toward this end, but the BSL isn't perfect. I think a better sort of license and maybe one more compatible with traditional FOSS needs to be developed. I'm chatting with a few people.

[mwcampbell]

I think what ZeroTier is doing is totally reasonable, and more companies who aspire to make money from open source should do it. One thing I especially like about ZeroTier's approach is that you publish a standard price list for your commercial license.

[Rochus]

LGPL was decided by Nokia who bought the IP from Trolltech for ~150 Mio $ and also came up for the development costs up to Qt 5.1. Digia and The Qt Company "bought" the IP for about 5 Mio $ from Nokia and now earn money with commercial licenses of a library where the most important development steps were already done before. According to the commit logs the contribution rate of Nokia was at ~80%, wheras the Qt Company is rather at ~40% and with focus on stuff they can sell. I regularly meet people who bought a licence to use the Qt framework not realizing that they could use it under LGPL. I know the wording of the commercial license. It places the licensee clearly worse than with the LGPL variant. Personally, I find the business practices of this company, which have been observed for some time, rather questionable.I had a commercial license with Trolltech, which cost me a lot of money. As soon as LGPL was available, I cancelled the contracts and avoided projects that could not be done with LGPL rather than signing such a single-edge contract with this company.

[mroche]

> commercial software

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.

[pjmlp]

Which is quite fair, they have to live from something.

[elproxy]

https://www.qt.io/licensing/ Commercial, GPL or LGPLv3 are available, which means they are going after embedded customers who typically don't want to open up their hardware (TVs, Cars, etc). Anybody else is free to reap the benefits, even for developing a commercial app on desktop (granted, that's a tough enough market to crack already these days).

[detaro]

As the parent explicitly stated, not all components are available under LGPL.