This is the body of an email I sent to Trolltech about their price increase on Qt4. Enjoy!
Hello,
I just checked the prices for Qt4 and my mouth dropped open. I was shocked by the price increase which is nearly doubled from Qt3. I have a contract lined up and was considering purchasing a license to Qt after I had enough money saved up, but this price increase is making me reconsider.
With the release of Qt under the GPL for Windows I am seriously considering making an attempt at making any future Qt apps open-source and finding another means to generate revenue other than selling the software. All that due to the price increase.
The combination of the GPL Windows release and the increase in prices makes buying Qt much less attractive. I would definitely bought a license if the prices stayed the same or even decreased. I'm sure a number of other potential licensees are thinking the same thing.
This price increase will not recoup any losses caused by GPLing Qt for Windows. Most likely it'll do just the opposite by causing people to work with the GPL. I would have decreased the price if I was in charge of setting the price.
Regards,
Nolan Eakins
Agree
I was promoting usage of Qt in our company for a test project to see if Qt can be used instead of MS technologies, unfortunately after all the time and effort spent I was informing management of the older Qt3 prices, today with the new Qt 4 prices the toolkit will unfortunately not be considered at all... :(
End of story... $15'000 CDN for 2 developers for 2 platforms is insane... they better have decided to charge upon deployment fee... or something like this... management doesn't buy any argument if they have to pay so much ahead of the final product.
Now I will have to try to advocate for WxWidgets, which is much harder as it is "Free" and does not integrate with VS2003