news.kde.org: Interview: Trolltech's President Eirik Eng

Eirik Eng (A). We typically generate 50% of our income from Duo Packs -- these are licenses to develop on Windows and Unix. We also generate around 20% of sales from Qt/Embedded, and the rest is from single platform Qt licenses.

Q. Do you feel you are losing money because of GPL Qt?

A. We had the same rate of growth before the change in license. In the very early years, we were afraid that if we GPLed Qt, someone with more development muscle would create a hostile fork of Qt and, in a sense, take over our only product. You just don't take any chances with your only bread and butter.

So, as soon as we felt that we could outrun anyone trying to make a hostile fork, we switched to using the GPL. The switch did not affect our customers, and it had very little practical impact on the Open Source community. But the symbolic effect was astronomical. My inbox was flooded with "thank you" e-mails for quite some time.

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