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No free extensions allowed at first and 30% tariff for selling through the Qt marketplace. I think platform companies, like Apple and Qt, should not be able to

by brylie 7y ago

No free extensions allowed at first and 30% tariff for selling through the Qt marketplace. I think platform companies, like Apple and Qt, should not be able to impose such a high percentage as gatekeepers.

dchuk 7y ago
Can you recommend an objectively more fair alternative? It costs money to run things, and it’s fair for any vendor to charge what they will for a vig, participation in the marketplace should keep them “fair” in the sense that an unfair market wouldn’t have any participants... Also, if limiting the high percentage does end up being the plan of attack, who exactly is in charge of that?
- JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
  Cool. So what alternatives to the apple store do I have to reach iPhone users? Choice is why Apple isn't gouging developers with 100 dollar service subscriptions just to sign packages right?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - notduncansmith 7y ago
    The choice is in you wanting to reach iPhone users in the first place. If you don’t want to support Apple and their App Store, don’t make apps for iPhone. Maybe spend your time developing for a platform you feel more ideologically-aligned with. If you can’t make a living doing that, accept the hobby status of that endeavor and live your life. There are plenty of projects I’d love to get paid to work on but can’t yet, because I don’t care to sell to the speculative software development market.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >Also, if limiting the high percentage does end up being the plan of attack, who exactly is in charge of that? a regulatory agency. Credit Card transactions in the EU, for example, are capped at a fraction of a per cent and they still make plenty of cash. Infrastructure providers are essentially just glorified landlords and should not be allowed to extract economic rents from market participants. This is becoming a very blatant and obvious problem on a largely privatized internet. Enforcing low margin incentivises the correct behaviour which is openness and continued innovation. If steam would be forced to build new products rather than sitting on their platform we'd probably have had Half Life 3 a bunch of years ago.
  - jariel 7y ago
    "Enforcing low margin incentivises the correct behaviour which is openness and continued innovation. " Wow, no, this is just not true. 'Margins' vary widely from system to system, and it's generally best left to industry to figure that out. We spent a good part of the 20th century figuring out why central authorities are not good at setting prices. Where monopolies/oligarchies develop, there are possibly problems, which is why there are regulations against cartels, price fixing, anti-competitive behaviour etc.. Qt is just a small player platform, they are well within reason to charge 'whatever' prices they want for their 'marketplace'. If 99% of software was developed using their tooling, we might want them subject to their tooling, but this just isn't the case, so best to leave them be.
  - Chlorus 7y ago
    > If steam would be forced to build new products rather than sitting on their platform we'd probably have had Half Life 3 a bunch of years ago. Steam is a terrible example for this. First of all, Steam isn't a company, it's a product. Valve is the company. Second of all, unlike the App Store or other similar infrastructure, it's not like you're locked into Steam, so they're not really rent-seeking. Steam has had plenty of competitors over the years(Direct2Drive, Games for Windows Live, that garbage GameStop store), they all sucked, and as far as I know there's nothing stopping me from publishing on multiple stores & ignoring Steam. Third, Valve hasn't exactly been doing nothing - they've done more than any other company to the gaming experience under Linux & have pioneered VR. Odds are good they wouldn't have taken those risks had it not been subsidized with comfortable margins they got from Steam. If you had cited, say, the App Store, or something that has actual monopoly power in terms of infrastructure (like our good friends at Comcast) it would have been a much stronger argument.
    - Barrin92 7y ago
      >it's not like you're locked into Steam, so they're not really rent-seeking rent-seeking and monopolistic behaviour aren't the same things. Rent-seeking is the extraction of economic rent without providing new wealth with one prominent example being someone putting a chain across a private plot of land and charging you every time you want to cross over. Whether you've five guys doing that or one isn't particularly relevant. So while competition ameliorates the negative effects of these private platforms slightly the more fundamental broken part is really that they should not be allowed to exist in the first place. What is economically desirable is competition between developers and service providers on a common and open infrastructure with ideally all reimbursements beyond maintaining the platform going to the content creators. In fact, competition among platform owners in many ways makes the system worse because it incentivises walled gardens. This is starting to become obvious in the streaming world with Netflix gaining competition and as a result, platform-exclusive content becoming more important, or companies like Spotify or Stitcher enclosing the podcast ecosystem which used to be a prime example of openness.
Karliss 7y ago
Where does it say that free extensions are not allowed?
- empyrical 7y ago
  I don't see anything like that either. The second paragraph even says this: > Either for free or for a price. Also, there's stuff from KDE in the marketplace too: https://marketplace.qt.io/collections/plugins https://marketplace.qt.io/collections/plugins It seems like they don't host the binaries for free projects, but instead you provide a markdown file with installation instructions, like this: https://marketplace.qt.io/pages/karchiveinstructionspage https://marketplace.qt.io/pages/karchiveinstructionspage And when a user clicks "Get Extension", they are sent to this page. More information: https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_Marketplace_Publisher_Guidelines https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_Marketplace_Publisher_Guidelines
elnygren 7y ago
> I think platform companies, like Apple and Qt, should not be able to impose such a high percentage as gatekeepers. I don't think Qt really can... Feels like they're charging way too much, there's not much content and Qt itself is not exactly "hot stuff" right now. (Compared to, say, Apple as the % is same)
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Qt is not targeting app developers. They tried that a couple of years ago, only to find out most weren't willing to pay jumping into Xamarin, while their license was even cheaper vs the Xamarin one. They now care about enterprise and specialized embedded markets.
  - ldiracdelta 7y ago
    They seem to be continuing to support Android and iOS. Their platform works great and they've continued to add features over the last year and in years prior.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      It still doesn't match the mobile OS support that you can get with the competition. For me it looks more like a nice to have than anything else.
intrepidhero 7y ago
I think you misread: In the beginning, we’ll only allow companies to add paid extensions. There’s still some work to be done when it comes to automation of the publishing process and the financial process. Our goal is to make the necessary enhancements by the end of next year so that we can start onboarding paid content also from individuals. We will inform you about this later. The next paragraph has We, of course, promote the individual developers and companies to use standard “copy-lefts” ranging from GPL to MIT especially for free extensions. TLDR: For now, individuals can _only_ publish free extensions. Companies can publish either free or commercial extensions.
big_chungus 7y ago
"should not be allowed"? Not be allowed by whom? It doesn't take permission from anyone to open up an online store. Why shouldn't they, anyway?
rumanator 7y ago
> I think platform companies, like Apple and Qt, should not be able to impose such a high percentage as gatekeepers. I don't understand your complain. So there was no service available to the public, and people at Qt decided to invest their time and resources to provide a service where there was zero. Do they deserve criticism for doing something?
- black_puppydog 7y ago
  I think pointing out that virtually all the (near-) monopolies we see in the IT market place are (naturally) used to extract significant rent, that this is a canonical case of market failure and demands some sort of corrective is a valid point to make when yet another market sees a player trying to establish themselves as such a monopoly.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    You can't pull the "market failure" card when someone just launches a service where there was none.
    - black_puppydog 7y ago
      I can totally point out that in similar situations, the result was a market failure, and that it might be good to do something about that before it happens again. Now, to put up a straw-man against that, why not wait to see, usually these platforms fail pretty quickly anyhow? Well, if the outcome is either failure of the platform, or success of the platform by capturing (nearly) all of the market, then why no regulate it?
tiborsaas 7y ago
I don't find 30% outrageous at all. They do what I suck at as a developer, to market my products. They handle credit card transactions, recurring payments, marketing and distribution. Meanwhile I can focus on what I like, to develop cool shit. It's a win-win in principle.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  They do what I suck at as a developer, to market my products. Except they won't market your products, they will market the App Store and if you happen to be buried under a million other listings then tough luck.
  - tiborsaas 7y ago
    Well build stuff that solves a problem, name it properly and it will surface. When app stores launch they start with a handful, it makes sense to jump on early.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      That's like rolling a dice and hoping you get lucky.
      - tiborsaas 7y ago
        That's pretty much how life works :)
mbel 7y ago
Free extensions seem to be allowed. Check this one for example: https://marketplace.qt.io/products/incredibuild https://marketplace.qt.io/products/incredibuild Obviously it needs Incredibuild server and license, but the plugin is distributed via Qt Marketplace free of charge.

by brylie 7y ago

dchuk 7y ago

Can you recommend an objectively more fair alternative? It costs money to run things, and it’s fair for any vendor to charge what they will for a vig, participation in the marketplace should keep them “fair” in the sense that an unfair market wouldn’t have any participants... Also, if limiting the high percentage does end up being the plan of attack, who exactly is in charge of that?

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
Cool. So what alternatives to the apple store do I have to reach iPhone users? Choice is why Apple isn't gouging developers with 100 dollar service subscriptions just to sign packages right?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  The choice is in you wanting to reach iPhone users in the first place. If you don’t want to support Apple and their App Store, don’t make apps for iPhone. Maybe spend your time developing for a platform you feel more ideologically-aligned with. If you can’t make a living doing that, accept the hobby status of that endeavor and live your life. There are plenty of projects I’d love to get paid to work on but can’t yet, because I don’t care to sell to the speculative software development market.
Barrin92 7y ago
>Also, if limiting the high percentage does end up being the plan of attack, who exactly is in charge of that? a regulatory agency. Credit Card transactions in the EU, for example, are capped at a fraction of a per cent and they still make plenty of cash. Infrastructure providers are essentially just glorified landlords and should not be allowed to extract economic rents from market participants. This is becoming a very blatant and obvious problem on a largely privatized internet. Enforcing low margin incentivises the correct behaviour which is openness and continued innovation. If steam would be forced to build new products rather than sitting on their platform we'd probably have had Half Life 3 a bunch of years ago.
- jariel 7y ago
  "Enforcing low margin incentivises the correct behaviour which is openness and continued innovation. " Wow, no, this is just not true. 'Margins' vary widely from system to system, and it's generally best left to industry to figure that out. We spent a good part of the 20th century figuring out why central authorities are not good at setting prices. Where monopolies/oligarchies develop, there are possibly problems, which is why there are regulations against cartels, price fixing, anti-competitive behaviour etc.. Qt is just a small player platform, they are well within reason to charge 'whatever' prices they want for their 'marketplace'. If 99% of software was developed using their tooling, we might want them subject to their tooling, but this just isn't the case, so best to leave them be.
- Chlorus 7y ago
  > If steam would be forced to build new products rather than sitting on their platform we'd probably have had Half Life 3 a bunch of years ago. Steam is a terrible example for this. First of all, Steam isn't a company, it's a product. Valve is the company. Second of all, unlike the App Store or other similar infrastructure, it's not like you're locked into Steam, so they're not really rent-seeking. Steam has had plenty of competitors over the years(Direct2Drive, Games for Windows Live, that garbage GameStop store), they all sucked, and as far as I know there's nothing stopping me from publishing on multiple stores & ignoring Steam. Third, Valve hasn't exactly been doing nothing - they've done more than any other company to the gaming experience under Linux & have pioneered VR. Odds are good they wouldn't have taken those risks had it not been subsidized with comfortable margins they got from Steam. If you had cited, say, the App Store, or something that has actual monopoly power in terms of infrastructure (like our good friends at Comcast) it would have been a much stronger argument.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    >it's not like you're locked into Steam, so they're not really rent-seeking rent-seeking and monopolistic behaviour aren't the same things. Rent-seeking is the extraction of economic rent without providing new wealth with one prominent example being someone putting a chain across a private plot of land and charging you every time you want to cross over. Whether you've five guys doing that or one isn't particularly relevant. So while competition ameliorates the negative effects of these private platforms slightly the more fundamental broken part is really that they should not be allowed to exist in the first place. What is economically desirable is competition between developers and service providers on a common and open infrastructure with ideally all reimbursements beyond maintaining the platform going to the content creators. In fact, competition among platform owners in many ways makes the system worse because it incentivises walled gardens. This is starting to become obvious in the streaming world with Netflix gaining competition and as a result, platform-exclusive content becoming more important, or companies like Spotify or Stitcher enclosing the podcast ecosystem which used to be a prime example of openness.

Karliss 7y ago

Where does it say that free extensions are not allowed?

empyrical 7y ago
I don't see anything like that either. The second paragraph even says this: > Either for free or for a price. Also, there's stuff from KDE in the marketplace too: https://marketplace.qt.io/collections/plugins https://marketplace.qt.io/collections/plugins It seems like they don't host the binaries for free projects, but instead you provide a markdown file with installation instructions, like this: https://marketplace.qt.io/pages/karchiveinstructionspage https://marketplace.qt.io/pages/karchiveinstructionspage And when a user clicks "Get Extension", they are sent to this page. More information: https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_Marketplace_Publisher_Guidelines https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_Marketplace_Publisher_Guidelines

elnygren 7y ago

> I think platform companies, like Apple and Qt, should not be able to impose such a high percentage as gatekeepers. I don't think Qt really can... Feels like they're charging way too much, there's not much content and Qt itself is not exactly "hot stuff" right now. (Compared to, say, Apple as the % is same)

pjmlp 7y ago
Qt is not targeting app developers. They tried that a couple of years ago, only to find out most weren't willing to pay jumping into Xamarin, while their license was even cheaper vs the Xamarin one. They now care about enterprise and specialized embedded markets.
- ldiracdelta 7y ago
  They seem to be continuing to support Android and iOS. Their platform works great and they've continued to add features over the last year and in years prior.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    It still doesn't match the mobile OS support that you can get with the competition. For me it looks more like a nice to have than anything else.

intrepidhero 7y ago

I think you misread: In the beginning, we’ll only allow companies to add paid extensions. There’s still some work to be done when it comes to automation of the publishing process and the financial process. Our goal is to make the necessary enhancements by the end of next year so that we can start onboarding paid content also from individuals. We will inform you about this later. The next paragraph has We, of course, promote the individual developers and companies to use standard “copy-lefts” ranging from GPL to MIT especially for free extensions. TLDR: For now, individuals can _only_ publish free extensions. Companies can publish either free or commercial extensions.

big_chungus 7y ago

"should not be allowed"? Not be allowed by whom? It doesn't take permission from anyone to open up an online store. Why shouldn't they, anyway?

rumanator 7y ago

> I think platform companies, like Apple and Qt, should not be able to impose such a high percentage as gatekeepers. I don't understand your complain. So there was no service available to the public, and people at Qt decided to invest their time and resources to provide a service where there was zero. Do they deserve criticism for doing something?

black_puppydog 7y ago
I think pointing out that virtually all the (near-) monopolies we see in the IT market place are (naturally) used to extract significant rent, that this is a canonical case of market failure and demands some sort of corrective is a valid point to make when yet another market sees a player trying to establish themselves as such a monopoly.
- rumanator 7y ago
  You can't pull the "market failure" card when someone just launches a service where there was none.
  - black_puppydog 7y ago
    I can totally point out that in similar situations, the result was a market failure, and that it might be good to do something about that before it happens again. Now, to put up a straw-man against that, why not wait to see, usually these platforms fail pretty quickly anyhow? Well, if the outcome is either failure of the platform, or success of the platform by capturing (nearly) all of the market, then why no regulate it?

tiborsaas 7y ago

I don't find 30% outrageous at all. They do what I suck at as a developer, to market my products. They handle credit card transactions, recurring payments, marketing and distribution. Meanwhile I can focus on what I like, to develop cool shit. It's a win-win in principle.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
They do what I suck at as a developer, to market my products. Except they won't market your products, they will market the App Store and if you happen to be buried under a million other listings then tough luck.
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  Well build stuff that solves a problem, name it properly and it will surface. When app stores launch they start with a handful, it makes sense to jump on early.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    That's like rolling a dice and hoping you get lucky.
    - tiborsaas 7y ago
      That's pretty much how life works :)

mbel 7y ago

Free extensions seem to be allowed. Check this one for example: https://marketplace.qt.io/products/incredibuild https://marketplace.qt.io/products/incredibuild Obviously it needs Incredibuild server and license, but the plugin is distributed via Qt Marketplace free of charge.