Re: KDE & Companies: Ask Trolltech Anything

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Re: KDE & Companies: Ask Trolltech Anything
by David O'Connell on Monday 09/Jul/2001, @07:07

I think there are some subtleties. In an ideal free market if somebody asks for too high a price they lose sales. However software of this nature does not operate in a pure classical free market. Software that forms a platorm has a what economists call a "networking effect", similar to the one the Microsoft has gained from in the past. The more people use your software, the more difficult it is for people to choose an alternative. Once that effect kicks in, in TrollTechs favour, they can extact extract quite punitive terms and people still won't change, as the cost of switching becomes high. The effect hasn't quite kicked in yet for KDE/QT yet, so TrollTech are reasonable for now.

Also having KDE people work for Trolltech cuts both ways. Yes, they represent KDEs interests to Trolltech, then again, they can also influence KDE to favour Trolltech. For the moment I think these opposing tensions are well balanced. However when Trolltech derive a serious amount of revenue as a result of KDEs success, money might become an pressure that distorts these developers choices. Functionality that might be better placed within the LGPL'd kdelibs ends up in QT and under the dual license where they can charge for it.

I like Trolltech, I like QT but my real loyalty is with KDE. I don't have a problem with companies earning a buck, but TrollTech are in a similar position to Microsoft in the 80s, they are in a controlling postion to influence key developers APIs.

Does the dual licensing really protect KDEs interests once commercial developers use KDE as a platform? The fact is, I don't know for sure. I want to believe Trolltech will always be benign but
does KDE really have the safeguards in place. Does the QT free edition guarantees work when commercial KDE development becomes the main influence for QT?

TrollTech, Are my fears overblown?

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