[kovac]

Considering the quality and capabilities of Qt, I really think they should just sell commercial licences. Considering the fact that the engineers at Qt need to pay to eat and pay their bills just like me, I find it absurd to expect something like this for free. In that sense, I think the current situation is very gracious.

[Nokinside]

It's not gracious. They have binding contract with KDE to release the code as open source within 12 months.

They can't change that without negotiating new contract. That would require giving something to get something in return. Only thing they can do is to do just the minimum. This is the current issue. They are moving towards the bare minimum.

[detaro]

What about all the people not working at Qt Company that wrote most of the code? Qt company immensely benefits from the work done by others under the condition it remains also available under open source licenses.

[kovac]

This is a good point but I'm not going to be too quick to comment on those developers. Because they may be working on paid products and they contribute to the upstream project when they find certain features missing.

I like opensource, I myself am a Linux user. I just like a world where perhaps individual devs can build nifty useful software that we pay a small fee for and use. This way the small guys can benefit. Unfortunately, the current state of OSS (which has changes since the early days) are concentrating more power in the hands of a few organizations.

Take Sublime Text for example. I like it that an engineer builds something useful, ask a one time fee for it and we pay something really affordable for it (while there was also a free version available). This way, talented software engineers could actually make a decent living without everyone has to build crappy software for an advert-based economy. So, IMHO, opensourcing the software is an act of grace and would be at the discretion of those engineers. To expect everything to be FOSS or perhaps even demand that, I find is detrimental for individual software engineers/small players.

[detaro]

Many contributors aren't. And even if they are, there is a clear open license they rely on, and Qt company is in the unique position to be allowed to sell exceptions to that. Companies actually contributing to open-source they use is a good thing.

Qt Company is also a 300+ employee company with 8-digit revenue. They are not some small shop trying to survive, they are a corporation that over-promised growth to their shareholders and now is trying to squeeze rules that have existed for 20 years to turn some part of the open-source ecosystem into paying customers, threatening to risk the entire open ecosystem around it for this, which includes many small shops and individuals.

[kovac]

I see, thanks for the clarification and it makes sense.

[stormdennis]

One problem is reluctance to buy closed-source from a one man business, it could even be regarded as negligent. Actually, having said that, Delphi had a thriving third party component ecosystem where developers commonly purchased the source code for an additional fee.

[dmytroi]

I fully agree it would be great for Qt as a company to have a great business model. That being said, it's not that obvious if making Qt as a product commercial-only would be effective, as there are other options on a market that don't cost anything (or much). Maybe Qt should pivot into services instead?