What's in it for Trolltech? [LWN.net]

What's in it for Trolltech?

Posted Oct 3, 2007 15:14 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
In reply to: What's in it for Trolltech? by giraffedata
Parent article: Two free software choices for the Neo phone

> I know a few FOSS business models that seem to work, but this isn't one of them.
Actually, Trolltech business models is _exactly_ one of those that works: they make their toolkits GPL (_not_ LGPL) and sell the toolkits for the folks that want to develop proprietary apps.

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What's in it for Trolltech?

Posted Oct 3, 2007 23:03 UTC (Wed) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I believe you're saying that Trolltech makes its products available two ways: under GPL for free and under another license with tighter restrictions on copying, for money.

I can understand how the second offering is good for business, but my question is what about the first? What is the business advantage of offering the code under GPL?

What's in it for Trolltech?

Posted Oct 4, 2007 5:27 UTC (Thu) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]

>What is the business advantage of offering the code under GPL?

You shouldn't understimate the publicity advantage provided by this..

Without the GPL offering, Trolltech would only be one software provider among many other, with it everybody in the open-source community know about them.

For Qt, even if they use the GPL code, users may buy support and for the embedded edition I doubt that many phone/PDA providers want to GPL their app so they buy the commercial edition..

What's in it for Trolltech?

Posted Oct 4, 2007 8:21 UTC (Thu) by anandsr21 (guest, #28562) [Link]

"What is the business advantage of offering the code under GPL?"

There are several.
1) Free Advertisement.
2) Training to people who may further buy the proprietary version. You could do this with NDAs but who would want to sign one.
3) Free developers.
a) People who use the GPL version may find bugs and would have an interest in getting the upstream fixed.
b) Some give ideas that may be useful.
c) Others give code with new features.
4) Free Goodwill. This last is not considered by many as a business advantage but it should be there. People will prefer to buy from an ethical company given the chance. There is a perception of a reduced chance of getting screwed by an ethical company.

Without the GPL there is nothing that differentiates Qt from others. With Qt the benefit may not be so apparent but consider why MySQL is even considered against the big brand name DBMS. You will find the GPL to be at the base of the competitiveness of MySQL.

What's in it for Trolltech?

Posted Oct 4, 2007 12:57 UTC (Thu) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link]

Mindshare and network effects.

If they hadn't, how many of their potential customers would have chosen OpenMoko's LGPL based stack - albeit immature - over their proprietary stack? Even if it is more polished, if the mindshare is on the other side, it doesn't take long to catch up and maybe even overtake it.