| Yes, the Qt licensing model is the reason we have not touched it. Not interested in the ramifications it creates. For example, imaging you are selling your company and, during due diligence, the buyer discovers you have to release your source code. Yeah. Talk about having a bad day. In addition to this, I have exactly zero interest in any licensing model that requires a per-device fee. First of all, the fee, at least last time I looked, is completely opaque. My guess is they try to squeeze you for all they can. Second, and often more important, I have zero interest in Qt having an internal view of our business --which is what they get when you have to account for how many devices you made, sold and when. I don't mind the per-developer or site licenses. Per-device licenses are intrusive. They also get to tap into your profit margin. No, thanks. We have subscriptions with JetBrains for their excellent tools. If JetBrains turned around and said "You have to pay a fee for every unit sold", we would drop them like a hot potato. Everyone understands that example, yet somehow people don't recoil at this idea of per-device licensing. Hardware is hard enough as it is; adding a blood-sucking vampire to the equation doesn't make it easier. Think about it. Is the work Qt does more complex than what JetBrains do? Not at all. I can actually see JB's work being massively more difficult, particularly when you consider the array of tools they have to evolve and maintain. Why is it that Qt think they are entitled to poke a needle into your arm and suck blood out of every device you make? Even better, the open source license demands contribution of any enhancements back to Qt. They, in turn, take those advances and sell them through their commercial licensing program. Do the contributors get a piece of the action? Why not? Also, I believe that, until recently, if you stopped paying your developer licenses you were prohibited from selling your product. In other words, if I created a product using Qt five years ago and never touched it again, I'd have to pay them a developer's license for the life of the product. Once again, blood-sucking vampire behavior. That said, I believe I read something about this policy changing. Since I have not found a way to care about Qt, I didn't bother to read that article in detail. Another analogy: It's like what's going on with modern "smart" TV's. You go buy a TV and the manufacturers somehow feel entitled to harass you with advertising and all sorts of data gathering. Intrusive and wrong. How could Qt change my mind? I don't have a problem paying a reasonable per-developer annual license fee. What's reasonable? A few hundred dollars, say, $300 or so. After that, no per-device fees, get your microscope out of my ass and the license isn't tied to released products in any imaginable manner. I very much doubt this will happen. |
I would love to pay Qt a reasonable license fee once my product that uses it starts generating some decent revenues. I want them to succeed and keep building better versions. But I also don't want to have to shell out outrageous license fees when I am just getting started. This goes for any tool or library I choose to use.