That said, just having a publicly listed price anywhere feels like a big step forward for Qt. In the past there was just a "Contact Sales" form with whispered mentions across forums about real pricing. I think this dissuaded a lot of indie devs from trying out Qt.
I'm not sure why this new site doesn't just have a page called "Pricing" that explains what the monthly pricing means. Answer questions like "Do the tools lock out if the subscription is cancelled or do my rights to published statically linked Qt apps get cancelled?" and "Do I have to pay each month to keep those rights even if there is no active development on an app?".
My guess is that Qt must make a bulk of their revenue on enterprise sales and are reticent to open up a self serve sales process (highlighted by the squeeze page they put up when you click the 30 day trial download button). It is a shame because I think Qt could enable a lot of great apps.
The way the license information is presented is a little misleading. The Community edition is described as for 'Open Source & Hobby Projects', giving the impression that its not possible to release a commercial product using that. Thats not true of course, its LGPL licensed and so can be used for commercial software as long as the license obligations are adherred to.
The desktop app I sell uses Qt, against the LGPL license. I would probably pay for the commercial license from them if it was more reasonably priced, but $295 per month to distribute on Mac and Windows is just too much to swallow.
Roughly: link dynamically or provide object files for relinking; don't prohibit reverse engineering of your software (for compatibility with new library versions); don't modify the LGPLed library to require a proprietary component to function.
Why would someone need/want to use Qt by not dynamically linking the library. I've never understood Qt's business model or what I can and cannot do with it. I just use pyside on my pet projects.
I think the catch is that, being GPL licensed, any distribution of the software with modified source would be required to be open-sourced. With there commercial license you wouldn't have to release your code. (Though they list GPL, LGPLv2.1, and LGPLv3, you may or may not depending which license it actually is under and how you compile and run your program).
How exactly did they get around the GPL to offer a commercial license anyway? I would have presumed that people doing open-source work on Qt would have submitted their work under only the GPL, and re-licensing that code should be illegal since they didn't write it.
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Licensor hereby grants, in exchange for good and valuable consideration, the receipt and sufficiency of which is hereby acknowledged, to Digia a sublicensable, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid-up copyright and trade secret license to reproduce, adapt, translate, modify, and prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, make available and distribute Licensor Contribution(s) and any derivative works thereof under license terms of Digia’s choosing including any Open Source Software license.
One difference is that the Qt source code is also covered by the KDE Free Qt agreement (linked in a sibling comment), which basically acts as a poison pill to ensure that no future owner of Qt can pull an Oracle and close off development.
For this reason, it's my opinion that the Qt CLA is much, much, less onerous than other CLAs, like Google's or Canonical's, in the sense of how much control is actually given away.
http://www.qt.io/download/
That said, just having a publicly listed price anywhere feels like a big step forward for Qt. In the past there was just a "Contact Sales" form with whispered mentions across forums about real pricing. I think this dissuaded a lot of indie devs from trying out Qt.
I'm not sure why this new site doesn't just have a page called "Pricing" that explains what the monthly pricing means. Answer questions like "Do the tools lock out if the subscription is cancelled or do my rights to published statically linked Qt apps get cancelled?" and "Do I have to pay each month to keep those rights even if there is no active development on an app?".
My guess is that Qt must make a bulk of their revenue on enterprise sales and are reticent to open up a self serve sales process (highlighted by the squeeze page they put up when you click the 30 day trial download button). It is a shame because I think Qt could enable a lot of great apps.