Hi, On Tuesday 14 August 2012 17:47:37 Atlant Schmidt wrote: > Chuck: > > Adding LGPL as a license option had an enormous impact on > > the commercial business but it also grew the number of users > > by an order of magnitude over the same time period. > > But all of those new LGPL users were *NOT* paying to > use Qt (except for those that bought support contracts).
Correct, but that does not matter! > An enormous-but-non-paying user base still supports > my argument that going FOSS decreases the commercial > value of a software property. Wrong: it decreases the direct sales value, but hugely increases the use value and with that the indirect sales value. Whether this is a problem or a desired outcome depends on your business model: do you sell software and then forget about it (like Microsoft, Adobe, etc.) or do you offer paid support (the other nine tenth of the industry)? See "The Magic Cauldron"[1], specifically section 9 [2]. You'll find Nokias business model in regards to Qt under "Widget Frosting" (make Nokia phones more attractive for developers) and Trolltechs and Digias under "Give Away the Recipe, Open a Restaurant" (grow a user base, then extract money by being better at supporting it than anybody else could hope to be). Even if a lot of commercial licensees went LGPL, many of them still need support of some kind. So it's not a complete loss - it is just a shift in business models. LGPL'ing Qt also opened a major backdoor for it: you can safely introduce it in any project where there are no major reasons against it. Eventually this will generate some support income that would otherwise have been spent on another framework vendor. [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/magic-cauldron/ [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/magic-cauldron/ar01s09.html Konrad
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