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> 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

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).

2 comments

The version I linked is an outwardly more measured, balanced take as it's trying to appear academic and researched. Here is what their sales people turn it into:

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.

Wow, that first article is really amusing. I've been experimenting with ChatGPT a reasonable amount lately, and the article really perked up my AI writing senses. The enumerated list with consistently, monotonously cautious and non-committal language, the final paragraph with a first sentence to the effect of "Overall, XYZ, but ABC" followed by "It's important to ...".

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.

Those LinkedIn posts indeed show a more negative side of the issue. Still, I have high hopes for the future of Qt, and if they ever go full-on commercial, there is an agreement with KDE regarding that situation (but I'm too lazy to find it right now).

> there is an agreement with KDE regarding that situation

https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/

Yes, there's a solid contract in place to ensure Qt's open source availability that's worth a lot!

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.

>that the only reason anyone cares about their product is its open source pedigree and credibility

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/

I'm partly responsible for technology selection at one of their larger commercial customers, and I do care and worry quite a bit (and have also shared these opinions in a customer keynote at their last internal sales conf). Upsetting the open source community has been shrinking the talent pool to hire from considerably; it's where your next senior devs/SMEs really get educated on a technology. The non-FOSS LTS has increased integration cost and complexity for us. The divergence between easy to instantiate developer desktops (i.e. Qt from distro) and what we carry in the product is also a headache. It also makes it harder for internal champions to argue for Qt, because open source solutions are very popular and this differentiator is now in widespread doubt.

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.