make it fully truly open source, charge premium for those who need your professional service to make profits, then it will fly to the sky.
I agree though that some licensing changes would really help them grow. I think they've hurt long term adoption in exchange for short term revenue. I don't blame them, baby needs new shoes after all, but as a huge fan of Qt I would love to see them become a standard. The product is good enough that they deserve it, but the license can be a bit scary for people who aren't already familiar with it.
LGPL isn't really that onerous though..
However, new modules in Qt 6 and any rewrites of modules Qt 5-> 6are now GPL, which is rather copy-left and will spread to the rest of your code.
That's very surprising, it would make upgrading from Qt 5 to Qt 6 a no-no for the small companies who use Qt LGPL. I'm sure they want to keep developer mindshare. Which LGPL Qt 5 modules became GPL in Qt 6?
How exactly does that work? Why would the company invest a lot in the library if they can just offer professional services without it? For example, KDAB already offer professional services around Qt and do not need to spend much in R&D.