Huh, price isn't even a THAT big problem. Software developed with LGPL version can't use the commercial one.
> 2.13. If I have started development of a project using the open source version (LGPL), can I later purchase a commercial version of Qt and move my code under that license?
> This is not permitted without written consent from The Qt Company. If you have already started the development with an open-source version of Qt, please contact The Qt Company to resolve the issue. If you are unsure of which license or version to use when you start development, we recommend you contact The Qt Company to advise you on the best choice based on your development needs.
IIRC they aren't really willing to give the permission to switch
My company accidently used one of their GPL-only products (on screen keyboad), thinking it was LGPL. We did the right thing and reached out to them to pay for it after it was already deployed to customers.
We had to pay for the entire Qt platform. 20,000 dollars plus a per-device royalty. That was a big mistake on our part, not paying attention to the licensing.
Also, I've personally tried out Qt a few different companies over the years and several of them would have been fine paying $50-200/dev/year (depending on company size), but the current price starts at $5508/dev/year! This is so much higher than Jetbrains or Visual Studio pricing that it's clearly targeting a market other than normal developers. This creates an awkwardness for Qt in my opinion. They want to build a community of developers to encourage and grow use of Qt, but most developers in the community are priced out from participating outside of open source.
My point is that my company would be willing to pay for Qt (and it did pay in the past), but not that much. In the current situation they don't get any money from us at all.
This is a much greater hassle than just linking dynamically, so we don't do it.
It seems their current strategy is to milk the users that can't use the LGPL users as much as possible, Additionally they try to convince as many people as possible that the LGPL version won't work for them, by having very confusing licensing terms on their website.
My company currently uses the LGPL version of Qt, and would gladly pay for the commercial one. In the Trolltech and Nokia days they actually did pay for it, but the prices are no longer affordable us. So we are stuck with the LGPL version for now.
We don't need a trillion supported platforms and tons of features. We have a Desktop App that runs on Windows (and in the future maybe Linux), and we use the old Widget stuff (currently no QML). We would gladly pay for the features we need, but not the ridicolous amound they are charging now.