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Comment by hermitcrab | Hacker News Reader

I'm a solo developer of 3 commercial Qt applications:

https://www.easydatatransform.com https://www.hyperplan.com https://www.perfecttableplan.com

I won't be eligible for the 'small business' plan as my revenue if over the threshhold they specify. And their full plan is crazily expensive. So I guess I'll be sticking with LGPL.

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It's off-topic, but I would like to thank you for your blog[0], I really like how open you are about your journey.

[0]https://successfulsoftware.net/

Thanks. Would like to blog more. But it is tough to find the time with 3 products!

Honestly, I think at this point we'd be best off discouraging use of Qt once and for all. Their licensing shenanigans have been causing all kinds of issues, and have done so for literal decades. It's fairly clear to me that they're not reliable in their licensing decisions.

I believe they have ended up with a freemium model where some big companies are paying them heaps, but the vast majority of users are paying them nothing. It must be a tough way to run a business. Especially one with loads of expensive software developers to feed.

I used to have a commercial license that was around £1k per year. But when they offered LGPL I moved to that. I haven't paid them since. And now the commercial licenses are much more expensive. You wonder they could come up with something that people like me would pay ~£1k per year for.

I really hope Qt company doesn't go bust.

Absolutely correct. I am a small commercial developer, I would gladly pay USD $500/yr. to insure Qt carries on.

I have come to the startling realization that, having converted to Qt, I am now 99% Win32-free. And I get a free pass to UWP (the OS/2 of the 21st century) should I need it.

$500 per year is a small price never to have to read Microsoft Win32 documentation. ;0)

Seriously you would wonder that the Qt company can't offer something attractive to solo developers and small companies around the $500 to $1000 per developer per year mark.

What makes it complicated to judge their pricing policy, and may explain why different people have such contrasted views on this, is that many of us need Qt for very basic things only (reasonably portable set of widgets for simple desktop apps) while a few industrial users have rare but imperious needs (such as support for fancy animations, modern or custom look and feel, support for embedded devices, professional hot line, IDE with support for enterprisy workflows etc). What I need Qt for requires very few engineers, just enough to maintain the same set of widgets that were already developed 20 years ago for most of them. Rather than paying a license I would use a Qt fork such as https://www.copperspice.com/ or use gtk or wait until revery is ready.

Should they donate qwidgets to a foundation I might consider contribute code and fund, though.

Qt has got really big and I probably only use 20% of it. But the 20% I use might be quite different to the x% you use.

Also Apple likes to nuke its developer ecosystem from orbit every 5 years. Qt struggles to keep the Mac classes stable and working in the face of this. I'm not sure an unfunded open source team is going to do any better.

I would use a Qt fork such as https://www.copperspice.com

I can see your point. However, who knows what crazy curves Microsoft or Apple are going to throw into their O/S'es in the future? I would still feel safer depending on a team of full-time, paid, commercial engineers to stay abreast.

They've been losing money, but it seems both their revenue and their staff has doubled in the past few years. I was surprised, but they actually look reasonably healthy.

Qt is all of:

- GPL since 2000

- GPLv3 with special exception (convertible to MPL, etc.) since 2005

- LGPL since 2009

It took me 10 minutes to find this out. Please be more responsible.

The only thing that matters license wise for 99% of people is https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/LICENSE.LGPLv3 which cannot be changed without renegotiating with KDE.

Yes but they can add commercial and GPLv3 only modules. Like they did with Qt Charts.

... so what ? other companies can also write Qt libraries under GPL and commercial licenses if they wish to - why shouldn't TQTC be able to do the same ? It does not make the rest of Qt any less LGPL.

For reference, on arch linux, there is a grand total of 3 packages with a hard dependency on qt charts, one of those being a python binding to it. versus the whole of KDE plus a ton of other things that have no problem depending on "just" the LGPL parts of Qt.

So what will we use? Electron?

Developing a massive professional grade UI library and platform is a monstrous undertaking. Who is going to pay for it? The alternative is for it not to exist.

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