I celebrate these news with a bit of unease. I've heard a lot of criticism regarding Qt 6 licensing policy. And personally I'd rather prefer more stability.
KDE has been maintaining Qt 5.15 by itself with the "KDE Qt Patch Collection" since then, as the 5.15.y bugfix releases are commercial-only for a year before they get released as open source.
In Qt 6 the situation is theoretically better as you get a new 6.x feature release faster than that one-year wait period, whereas 5.15 was the end of the line for Qt 5. The commercial-only also only happens after the first two bugfix releases, so there should be no significant waiting periods without releases. If the general quality of Qt releases is sufficiently high, the Patch Collection effort may no longer be needed.
That said, The Qt Company remains a topic of concern, publishing (also on LinkedIn by employees, with lame/thin "does not necessarily represent my employer's opinion" disclaimers) lots of "why open source software is scary" content lately, apparently unaware that the only reason anyone cares about their product is its open source pedigree and credibility: https://www.qt.io/blog/is-open-source-really-free
This is probably a reaction to competition by the BSD-licensed Flutter which has seen a lot of interest from their traditional commercial audience. Doubling down on "we're less open source" as a differentiator vs. _Google_ of all companies is quite a mind-bender. Also considering licensing/open source is why Flutter is getting that attention in the first place, and that Qt could tell a fantastic story here if it wanted to.
I don't think that article is really pushing for Qt to go closed source; rather, they're just trying to sell commercial subscriptions in order to make money (after all, the Qt Company has to stay alive somehow). And Schnieder makes it clear that building your stuff opensource is not a bad idea in many situations; he's just promoting Qt's commercial subscriptions (which IMO really are probably nice for corporations who want priority support and who don't want to deal with licensing issues).
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/severe-risks-open-source-soft...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/total-cost-ownership-open-sou...
> Additionally the organization has to look at remarkable costs when it comes to hardware and OS porting of the whole software product to be more hardware independent eg. to react on hardware shortages. Commercial software comes with a long list of supported hardware, sometimes with a list of more than 25 different hardware platforms.
Yes, open source software has such a terrible track record at portability indeed.
You're right that with a lot of goodwill, you can choose to interpret all of those publications as "it's good to have a commercial license option and that you can buy support if needed". Which I would agree with for many reasons, including supporting technology you rely on. But the way it's presented is in a fear-mongering style that's detrimental to the open source project that is also Qt, and I believe is vital to its overall wellbeing.
I've been working with Qt for going on 20 years, and there's been many episode to its story indeed. There will be more; it remains very capable and useful technology.
Just for kicks I asked it to write a list of reasons companies should be cautious of open source software or prefer commercial software, and a couple of points in the first attempt landed pretty close even in language used:
""" 1. Lack of Support: Open source software may not come with guaranteed technical support, which can be a problem for companies that need help with their software.
5. Lack of Documentation: Open source software may have limited documentation, making it harder for companies to understand how to use and configure the software.
6. Integration: Commercial software is often easier to integrate with other systems, since it is designed to work with specific hardware and software configurations. """
I imagine we'll be seeing things in this style a lot more often in the near future.
That's not really the case. Paying customers don't give a shit about the open source license and the company is growing fast. https://www.qt.io/investors/share-and-financials
Total return 977% in last 5 years. CAGR 46%. https://www.qt.io/investors/share-and-financials/share/
Business has been growing for them, but this isn't always necessarily on the strength of the product alone, but can also be a combo of inertia and fortuitous circumstances. For example, within the automotive industry the trend has been to merge multiple ECUs into fewer and consolidate technology stacks, and this has counter-intuitively probably resulted in quite a few sales as the OEMs move e.g. instrument cluster UIs from boutique solutions like Kanzi to the Qt stack they already used on the headunit (which is swallowing those other ECUs), or adding on more licenses for QNX guests. That doesn't mean the same customers aren't also already moving part of their HMI to Flutter/Unity/Unreal as the next thing rather than contemplating the port to Qt 6, however.
It's also that making moves to monetize existing customers more does work. For a time.
The effects of strategy changes like this can take many years to become apparent.
Qt is a great example of how you can force commercial highly profitable company to develop open source against their will even after it's sold multiple times. Trolltech and KDE jointly formed the foundation to make sure that Qt core stays open source.
Licensing agreement has not changed. Qt Company just stopped doing anything not required by the agreement between The KDE Free Qt Foundation and The Qt Company. https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreeme...
Time flies. Qt 6 has been around for more than two years already! And from what I understand, the change from Qt5 to Qt6 is a much smaller transition than the one from 4 to 5.