I have been trying to understand the Qt conversation better. As I have understood Jolla want to keep some parts of Sailfish behind walled garden they are using very old Qt version which allows them to use it free(?). As Jolla is using the free version which is licensed as open source they can’t easily make the jump and upgrade to Qt 5.15 or Qt6. Below I have tried to better understand the possible costs included in the upgrade.
Behind this link there is one section seen below. From this I understand that it should be possible to move from open source license to commercial Qt license → Qt6 at this point(?). This would need probably close coordination between Qt and Jolla and I get a feeling that there would be some kind hour based fee from Qt side included. I don’t have real glue how much SW companies charge based on hour but in our company I know one SW provider is charging 170€/h so I will use this as a reference.
On top of that all of Jolla’s developers would need license for the Qt if I am not mistaken. Checked from here Qt Pricing & Plans for Each Stage of Software Development and as I have no glue what kind of license would be necessary lets assume that the 4110€/year is the necessary one.
So if we assume that Qt would charge for 300h of work (random number as I have no knowledge of this kind work. Might be that I am optimistic that only two persons month work would be sufficient) and if they charge 170€/h that would be 51k€. On top of that would be yearly license fees and to my understanding Jolla has around 20 developers currently. So that would be ~82k€ yearly. And of course probably a lot of work by Jolla’s devs. We come to ~135k€ + Jolla’s in-house work.
That is a lot of money and resources in Jolla’s book but shouldn’t be impossible. From the Qt FAQ section I noticed that companies would need to get written permission from Qt. Can it be that Qt won’t allow for reason or other Jolla’s transition to commercial licensing? Can there be any other pumps hindering the transition that is not related to Jolla? I am just trying to understand the current situation better and I am not tech person or understand much of SW so my questions might be stupid and my numbers wrong…
And as I looked more information I pumped to the Qt6 available for developer preview post which seemed great if community can start to build apps on top of Qt6 even if Jolla don’t make the transition. I don’t really know if this is the case but it sounded like it. Thank you and apologies for long post 