[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company
It doesn't look like they are in the take over the world then monetise business, more like make a niche product and charge for it business. Then kind of makes sense to charge enterprise level license fees and operate with enterprisey licences and not bother too much with making the world a better place?
How would you propose funding such a thing?
Or would you like to volunteer to spend every waking moment of your life fixing bugs like "your layout manager misaligns buttons by 1-2 pixels but only on my system when the moon is full or on 64-bit CPUs in the Northern hemisphere while using Arabic languages."
That's what working with UI/UX is like, especially if you support... well... really anything other than native macOS on systems sold by Apple in the last 4 years only. It's why FOSS has never crossed over into the mainstream in any meaningful way. Making software is fun. Making it polished, pretty, and usable is a house of pain. Doing that across platforms is a journey into the lower circles of hell.
Electron is heavily subsidized by Google (and others) via Chromium. It's also a much more bloated user-unfriendly resource hog than Qt. But we use it because paying for quality software is unthinkable. Now off to Starbucks to buy another $12 coffee drink.
We all know how well those community contributions turned out.
Where can we learn about this? As far as it seems, qt is still, as always, distributed under the LGPL; which is as "open source" as it gets. The main site of qt even lists explicitly the Four Freedoms of the FSF : https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations
But the Qt Company has tried to make using the open source releases more and more inconvenient: licensing terms for the commercial version that are not at all forthcoming to OSS-to-commercial converts (implying that you need to pay for commercial licenses from the start), more limited access to precompiled binaries and registration obligations when you want to use the official Qt installer. That behavior seems to say that the company is bound by an agreement that they honor only reluctantly.
(To put a finer point on the specifics you mentioned: I believe they once had a policy of making the QML-to-C++ compiler available only to commercial customers, and not to FOSS users, treating it as something distinct from the 'core of Qt'. They later changed their minds on this. [0][1])
Presumably they could start work on a whole new toolkit, call it something other than Qt, and be free of the KDE agreement. This would no doubt be much more work than a typical major Qt release, but they do presumably have the option.
[0] https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-i...
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translate...
Which part is not true? It all looks correct to me.
And the KDE foundation is the only thing putting QT on the map. They wouldn't dare break the agreement, unless they want to burn their company to the ground.
A Qt app is so much lighter, faster and more enjoyable to use than any electron app. GTK still doesn't click for me as a programmer. Alternatives don't feel as functional as those three options.
Edit: The KDE bit is wrong, I still stand by the first portion though.
On the other hand, I really doubt the open source community is responsible for a large chunk of the Qt company's income.
Sure, breaking the agreement would further hurt their image in the open source community, but I doubt it would have a large impact on the company's future.
I work for a car company using Qt. The open source community around Qt is a significant contributor to the talent pool we hire from (myself included), and it is also a regular contributor to (and indirectly/broadly, the inspiration for) integration-related Qt modules (e.g. QtWayland) we like. Its health is important.
Plus the GPL version is good enough for the said developer to learn Qt if it happens to be out of cash.
The whole thing felt so fragile.