Is Qt still open for business? (and maintenance/support q)
-
Hey all,
First, is Qt still open for business, or having some other major problem? I've been trying to ask some licensing/support questions, but not hearing back from anybody.
Second, I guess I might as well ask some of my questions here. So we've been licensing the commercial version of Qt for the past 15-20 years, paying the yearly fee for maintenance/support. When it was time to renew the maintenance/support this past fall, we were told that the maintenance/support plan is drastically changing going forward and our payments would not allow us to download Qt6 or beyond. I've been trying to ask questions about this to Qt, but not getting any answers. What do others here know about this? What is up with the new licensing scheme? Etc...
It sounded like they are trying to move to a SAAS paradigm, where if you don't pay, then can't use the Qt libraries. Is that correct? If so, how does it do that? Does that mean that you cannot build your application if your subscription lapses?
Any information you have would be appreciated.
Thanks much!
--Vince-- -
Wouldn't put it past them...but at least here new licensing terms are not retroactive to previous products, so stabilize on 5.x, develop in-house support, and thumb your nose at the Qt corp.
-
@VHuffaker said in Is Qt still open for business? (and maintenance/support q):
if you don't pay, then can't use the Qt libraries. Is that correct?
No. Most of Qt is licensed under LGPL license, which is quite moderate. As long as you can satisfy LGPL you can use these parts without paying or any other issues. Only modules licensed under GPL are problematic for closed source projects.
I'm wondering why you don't get responses from Qt Company as commercial user.
-
@Kent-Dorfman Right, that was the option we were given... keep paying our normal maintenance/support and stop at Qt5, or switch to this new plan, whatever it is, and move onto Qt6.
-
@VHuffaker said in Is Qt still open for business? (and maintenance/support q):
What do others here know about this? What is up with the new licensing scheme?
What I know/noticed as commercial licence holder for Qt5:
- When you log in into the maintenance tool or the online installer, you will not have an option to even download Qt6. Which is a pain and unreasonable, and the reason why I stopped testing/contributing to Qt6, just to much effort to get the binaries/source code.
- Qt5.15 will, as a LTS version, get commercial updates until end of life (26 May 2023) I can and will use Qt5 until than, and will have to renew my licence
- I was told, they had to increase the cost for the renewal, but in regards to inflation, thats not unreasonable
- Should we decide to change to Qt6, the payment scheme changes. The Qt5 system is, you pay one price for the whole of Qt, Qt6 is You pay one price per module. The price for one Qt6 module is much less than what the whole of Qt would cost in Qt5, but for my case I would at least need 3 modules:
Core, SerialPort, Bluetooth and therefore it would cost significantly more than now. - Also core features of Qt5, like QtCharts and QML TreeView are removed as a module (Charts) and removed from core (TreeView) and you have to purchase them annually from the marketplace
Officially, all this is to promote the use of Qt in small businesses, personally it feels like they try to squeeze every bit of money out of me.
-
@VHuffaker said in Is Qt still open for business? (and maintenance/support q):
I've been trying to ask some licensing/support questions, but not hearing back from anybody.
This really shouldn't happen...
May I ask where you're sending your questions? Perhaps @AndyS can help move things along
-
You should be getting contacted, if you could PM me the email you used to contact on I can track down what happened here for you.
-
-
@VHuffaker I got the PM as you probably will have noticed by now :)
-
@VHuffaker said in Is Qt still open for business? (and maintenance/support q):
@AndyS Sorry, I haven't PM'd anybody here before. I started a chat with you and sent you a message. Let me know if there's some other button I should have pushed. :)
The chat provides this forum's PM (private message) functionality, so you're all good
