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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

$499 for small companies and startups.

QT is finally understanding their pricing was totally wrong.

This price includes the use of the full Qt for Device Creation product, but not any distribution licenses – these need to be agreed separately. It also includes only installation support, whereas a regular commercial license comes with full support.

What do they mean, no distribution licenses? For 500/year I can develop but not sell? :)

Yes, that's my understanding. A "distribution license" allows you to actually sell an instance of your product under the commercial licensing agreement.

Is that a new thing invented to go with this start-up licence? I can't see any reference to distribution licences elsewhere in their pricing material.

It seems... eccentric... to make a public announcement of the price of a new licence, then mention that in order to actually use it you'll need to buy another licence as well whose price you aren't publishing.

No, "distribution licenses" are very common in this type of commercial software for embedded systems market. If you talk to Wind River, QNX, OpenRTOS, Qt, Crank, or any of the numerous software tool vendors for commercially-supported embedded software, there will be a "development license" which you pay to license the tooling, source code and precompiled binaries, plus a per-unit "distribution license" to actually sell their product as a component of your product. The pricing is usually really reasonable compared to your per-unit BOM cost and expected production quantities.

> No, "distribution licenses" are very common in this type of commercial software for embedded systems market

So does this whole topic apply only to embedded systems then? I am a Qt developer who has bought Qt licences in the distant past, but I know nothing about embedded systems, so that would explain why we seem to be talking at cross purposes as well as why I found the original post so puzzling.

For desktop & mobile applications, I can go to qt.io, ask to buy a Qt licence, and be quoted straight away a per-developer annual fee with no reference to any separate distribution licence. What I'm wondering is whether this will also be the case for the new micro-business tier, or whether it introduces some requirement for a separate distribution licence that the normal application development licence does not have.

Edit: I see now that I have completely mis-read the original post. It says that the micro-business tier offers a licence for "Qt for Device Creation", not for Qt in general. So it probably isn't available at all for desktop & mobile applications. I'm sorry for wasting your time.

But why would I develop if i can't sell? If i do open source, I have no need for a license. If i don't, the 500/year option is useless?

Plenty of companies develop desktop software for internal use. They built it, update it, and use it heavily but never sell it. I'm not sure how many of these fall into Qt's startup/small business category, though.

It seems like this license is maybe ideal for a small company that wants commercially-supported Qt to use while developing a product prior to selling it?

That seems like a fairly small niche to target, but presumably they're making this change based on actual usage data and not just conjuring it out of thin air.

As mentioned elsewhere, it's mainly about Qt for device creation. Not for regular desktop apps. For device creation you'll very likely need the commercial version to get platform support.

For companies earning under $100000 a year. That's pretty meager for a company employing up to 5 people. Qt is a great environment, but it is still ridiculously expensive for small companies.

For what it does, I don't think so, seems like a bargain.

If you have more than 5 employees or make more than $100k/year (i.e. even in a low wages section of the US, you pay more than one developer) - it's the old price of $5500/year/developer.

That's lot of money per dev.

Yeah wait a minute - 100k USD a year is barely one developer (Especially after benefit costs, etc) - and they say revenue too.

So basically if you're a one man shop it's an improvement I guess?

Not everyone lives in USA.

That's definitely true, but even outside the US, that's not much money. Keep in mind they're counting revenue, and employees are more expensive than their salary (Even if your salary is 50k you can still cost 70k or more).

According to their 2018 report they have 45.6M EUR in sales and loss of 2322 Euro. No idea where the 100k ist coming from.

https://mb.cision.com/Main/14183/2742082/991814.pdf (host blocked by uBlock for me)

They were referring to the new Qt license. Companies with less than $100k in revenue and less than five employees now only have to pay $499/year for a Qt commercial license.

It's basically a license for a tiny hardware startup to do Qt development with some limited support. It's not a very good license to sell product with, since any hardware startup that intends to use Qt in a product will pre-negotiate the distribution licenses up-front to capture the cost in the BOM for a unit. The only thing this does is allows you to ramp your commercial license costs as you get closer to profitability.

Basically if I'm a hardware company A, and I want to build a device that uses Qt5, originally I would buy a commercial license up-front for like 5 figures. If I'm building this product using my own personal funds and not VC-funding then this represents a huge outlay to get commercial support. What this $500 fee does is allows me to do commercial-licensed development out of the gate but without any support resources beyond installation(which was easy). Then, when I start doing design verification and am fixing bugs in the product I can start paying for a full commercial license and get support if I discover an issue with the graphics engine.

Getting Qt up and running can be difficult if you've never done any open-source or Linux development before. And for some systems, having installation support is paramount because the build systems are not tightly integrated with Qt's build system(EG QNX). So it can ease some difficulties in using Qt.

I think this is a pretty good offering for a niche of users who would otherwise avoid all the GPLv3 code and stick to Qt core, develop alternatives to all the good Qt modules like the virtual keyboards and stuff, and then determine they don't need to pay for a full commercial license once they get up and running. This provides an alternative path for those users where they can feel comfortable just using Qt's version of certain things. And it's probably a big win for them.

Not a win for them at all. Still have to do a legal distribution negotiation. So how would this help them ? It'll help them pay $500 a year more, that's all and that's the point of this change. Nothing more.

Parent laid it out already: without this option, device creators would need the full commercial license right from the start. This allows them to cheaply bootstrap and get the full license if/when their gadget proves promising.

Yes, for the things that QT does, it was extremely cheap.

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