Really It's a question of comparative greed. If you don't want your source in
the commercial arena, where people can make money off of you, well what's the
value of that as compared to the value of the code that you get for free, as
well as the value you get by those commercial interests testing the code for
you.
Really the commercial interests (and this is a generalization) use the
commercial license to buy support. Their main concern is in having Qt work,
while not divulging their "competitive advantages" which has nothing to do with
the Qt toolkit (unless you count Qt as a whole). I've worked at several (4)
companies that used Qt and some commercially licensed Qt (3), and it wasn't
about withholding patches or profiting from your code. In all cases it was
getting our existing code to work with a GUI, and not having to publish our
source. (Now moot due to LGPL)
Give some, get a lot.
________________________________
From: Girish Ramakrishnan <gir...@forwardbias.in>
To: Bo Thorsen <b...@fioniasoftware.dk>
Cc: interest@qt-project.org
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 2:46 PM
Subject: Re: [Interest] Contributor agreement rundown
On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 2:01 AM, Bo Thorsen <b...@fioniasoftware.dk> wrote:
> Den 18-04-2012 10:33, John Layt skrev:
>> It is a trade-off, but not entirely one-way. They get to sell your code, but
>> the money raised goes towards supporting Qt.
>
> Actually, I see this more as a "yes, you can buy commercial support". It
> closes one of the objections my customers have. Of course, I usually
> convince them that I'm all the support they need :) But it is a question
> I've heard so often with OSS software, and it's one of the things
> non-OSS people are concerned about.
>
> It doesn't look like Digia is using this to fund a lot of new Qt
> development, but if they use it to support older Qt versions, this is a
> great thing as well (assuming those patches go to the OSS Qt). People
> paid on OSS projects should do the boring parts :)
A quick update from qt-project: Digia may not be contributing a lot to
new development (yet) but they have been contributing quite a bit (a
quick grep shows ~1500 patches with them as author) to Qt4 and they
have been doing a great job so far.
Girish
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