[Deganta]

I think Qt needs to rethink their licensing model. Currently you either pay them a LOT of money for everything they offer, or you don't pay them anything and just use the LGPL version (when that's possible).

It seems their current strategy is to milk the users that can't use the LGPL users as much as possible, Additionally they try to convince as many people as possible that the LGPL version won't work for them, by having very confusing licensing terms on their website.

My company currently uses the LGPL version of Qt, and would gladly pay for the commercial one. In the Trolltech and Nokia days they actually did pay for it, but the prices are no longer affordable us. So we are stuck with the LGPL version for now.

We don't need a trillion supported platforms and tons of features. We have a Desktop App that runs on Windows (and in the future maybe Linux), and we use the old Widget stuff (currently no QML). We would gladly pay for the features we need, but not the ridicolous amound they are charging now.

[slezyr]

> My company currently uses the LGPL version of Qt, and would gladly pay for the commercial one. In the Trolltech and Nokia days they actually did pay for it, but the prices are no longer affordable us. So we are stuck with the LGPL version for now.

Huh, price isn't even a THAT big problem. Software developed with LGPL version can't use the commercial one.

> 2.13. If I have started development of a project using the open source version (LGPL), can I later purchase a commercial version of Qt and move my code under that license?

> This is not permitted without written consent from The Qt Company. If you have already started the development with an open-source version of Qt, please contact The Qt Company to resolve the issue. If you are unsure of which license or version to use when you start development, we recommend you contact The Qt Company to advise you on the best choice based on your development needs.

https://www.qt.io/faq/

IIRC they aren't really willing to give the permission to switch

[gmueckl]

There is no legal barrier for them to relicense Qt from LGPL to a commercial license for a customer. They are just strongarming customers into paying for licenses early on during development by refusing to do so.

[pknopf]

Absolutely.

My company accidently used one of their GPL-only products (on screen keyboad), thinking it was LGPL. We did the right thing and reached out to them to pay for it after it was already deployed to customers.

We had to pay for the entire Qt platform. 20,000 dollars plus a per-device royalty. That was a big mistake on our part, not paying attention to the licensing.

[evanmoran]

Agreed completely. I think the licensing model is the issue, and if you look on this page alone people who have had to pay all say it was because of a mistake rather than as something they did because the money gave their company an advantage.

Also, I've personally tried out Qt a few different companies over the years and several of them would have been fine paying $50-200/dev/year (depending on company size), but the current price starts at $5508/dev/year! This is so much higher than Jetbrains or Visual Studio pricing that it's clearly targeting a market other than normal developers. This creates an awkwardness for Qt in my opinion. They want to build a community of developers to encourage and grow use of Qt, but most developers in the community are priced out from participating outside of open source.

[colejohnson66]

What’s wrong with the LGPL? If you dynamically link them, then you don’t need to open source your product. It’s only a problem if you want to statically link.

[Deganta]

Nothing is wrong with the LPGL version for us. Static linking would be nice sometimes, but really necessary.

My point is that my company would be willing to pay for Qt (and it did pay in the past), but not that much. In the current situation they don't get any money from us at all.

[de_watcher]

You can link statically. Oh my god, we've been over this infinite number of times.

[Deganta]

Yes you can, but if you do that you have to release the Object files and make it possible for the customers to link them to their own Qt version.

This is a much greater hassle than just linking dynamically, so we don't do it.

[de_watcher]

Usually nobody asks to release. It's a risk to get that kind of request, but it's way more trivial than routine software development risks.

[pknopf]

My company paid 20,000 dollars, plus a per-royalty, for an on-screen keyboard...