[api]

The inconvenience of software licensing and license management and the potential legal issues that incorporating third party licensed software can create for a project are a much bigger impediment to the use of commercial developer tools and libraries than the cost.

If the cost is reasonable for what you're getting, most companies wouldn't think twice about paying for a library or a dev tool if it'll help them ship faster or better products... and if they didn't have to think about it much anymore after that decision. You can see this by the willingness of companies to shell out for SaaS tools like GitHub paid accounts and commercial CI/CD services. There isn't really much lock-in there. If you need to abandon GitHub you can move to GitLab or stand up your own instance of something like Gitea. Might lose some meta-data but your main code (product) is intact.

Instead the nature of licensing means that the license of the library you're incorporating contaminates your project and you have to get legal involved. Even having to contact legal is generally the kiss of death.

It also raises questions about whether the vendor can rug pull you in the future and kill your product. To be fair this can sort of happen in open source if you rely on a complex project that gets abandoned and don't have the resources to adopt it, but at least there you have some recourse and you can keep using what already exists until you have a long term solution.

This complexity is really why we can't have nice things, since things as powerful as Qt really do require funding in one form or another.