I see it diferently, when I want to enjoy the work of Qt devs as free beer, my work is also free beer.
When I want to get paid for stuff I develop with the work of Qt devs, then like in other profession, I pay the creators of tools I get money to put bread on the table.
They also need to buy bread, so it is only fair we share the same conditions.
Yes, but sharing the cost with lots of other developers would them enable to bring the price down.
For me, it seems like Jetbrains vs. Borland/Inprise/Codegear/Embarcadero.
Jetbrains always had reasonable prices, but a huge amount of customers.
Embarcadero tries to milk the few customers that remain.
Embarcadero Delphi and C++ Builder are used for legacy stuff, it's maintenance mode and Idera (owners of Embarcadero) are following the same model as Broadcom, Microfocus and others: milk enterprise customers because they are too invested and they are not going to rewrite those applications. I don't think anyone has started any meaningful project in Delphi or C++ for at least 10-15 years.
Qt on the other hand is used a lot and new projects are started with Qt everyday. Qt is not Embarcadero.
They are still quite strong on the German, market and Microsoft is still clueless in making anything that can beat C++ Builder, the best they could do was C++/CX and internal politics killed without any regards for the customers using it.
C++/WinRT is a joy to use for anyone whose maximum of productivity was using Visual C++ 6.0 for COM development, exactly the same Visual Studio tooling. /s
So plenty of enterprises do new projects in C++ Builder, and Delphi comes for the ride.
I know of a company in Belgium that does laboratory automation software in Delphi, because they don't want to use languages like C and C++, and .NET lacked the low level coding and native compilation that they want.
For them it isn't legacy, rather from their point of view the alternatives suck, and they will keep at it as long as they can.
That is the usual speech, yet when they offered cheaper packages about 10 years ago, everyone wanted free beer, hence why they turned into those that actually pay.
When everyone wants free beer, in the end they get Electron.
When I want to get paid for stuff I develop with the work of Qt devs, then like in other profession, I pay the creators of tools I get money to put bread on the table.
They also need to buy bread, so it is only fair we share the same conditions.