
The Qt Marketplace - Karliss
https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-marketplace
======
TeMPOraL
Wait, do I read it correctly? A _GUI library_ has its own appstore now? How?
Why?

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choward
Your comment may read as condescending or snarky but I was wondering the same
thing. Then I went and looked at a couple of extensions and the cheapest was
$2,000. The button says "Buy extension" and right above the button it says
"Subscription will renew in one year". Is that for updates or what?

At the bottom of the page it says "Kuesa 3D Runtime may be used as a tool in
the creation of applications. To incorporate it as a library into an
application and sell on as a commercial application, ask us for Kuesa 3D
Studio. Read the complete EULA."

What am I buying? Am I just buying the privilege to be able to develop with
their proprietary software but I can't actually distribute it? Also, why is
there a link to github. Is this open source? I'm so confused. I shouldn't have
to read a complete EULA to get a basic understanding and I shouldn't have to
already know what something is to purchase it in a marketplace. Marketplaces
are for discoverability.

~~~
zaroth
Well I think in this case the price may indicate it’s a fairly specialized
tool. I’m not sure the benefit of putting something like that on a
marketplace, since anyone spending $2,000 on Kuesa definitely knows where to
find it already...

I don’t do anything even close to this space, but I found
[https://www.kdab.com/kuesa/](https://www.kdab.com/kuesa/) was a fairly good
overview of their offering, as far as these pages typically go.

~~~
blondin
wow this reminds me of borland delphi and mfc components and libraries. now
with subscription on top of it. it might actually work because it did before
for highly specialized gui components.

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nextweek2
I see this as a failed launch. The website looks like it has been knocked up
using standard components by a small team over a couple of weeks. Ask yourself
'What problem does this solve?' If I wanted a C++ library that was Qt friendly
I either know about it already or I Google for "doxygen qtcreator" or "qt
vlc". If this site going to be more up to date than the entire Internet?

Key things are clearly missing, the description of what components do (you get
a logo and a name) or their license is not forefront. A lot of KDE stuff is in
there which really doesn't fit well, KDE Icons were not high on anybody's
list. If I am in the 2D space, I'd want to browse 2D libraries and tools. The
tag cloud at the bottom is a massive blob of un-curated words:
[https://marketplace.qt.io/](https://marketplace.qt.io/)

Oh, lets pick the doxygen plugin for QtCreator and click 'Get Extension' [1].
hmmm I have to compile it myself!

This is little more that a collection of links to the real products. Often you
are better going to the original source to find details of what you need.
Browsing this site adds little value.

When I first hear about Qt Marketplace, I (wrongly) assumed they were going to
solve package management for Qt development which would be game changing.
Instead we get a wiki linking out to existing libraries which you have to take
care of yourself.

Cross-platform C++ package management would be a breakthrough and I was
expecting Qt to hook up with conan and a build farm. That would be a game
changer.

The dev team did a good job but the stakeholders and the product management
need to really reflect on what value they added to the lives of their target
users. If this thing cost £50k to produce then I don't see it making that
money back for the Qt company in the next 12 months.

[1] [https://marketplace.qt.io/collections/qt-creator-
extensions/...](https://marketplace.qt.io/collections/qt-creator-
extensions/products/doxygen-plugin-1)

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brylie
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
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?

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Barrin92
>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.

~~~
Chlorus
> 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
>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.

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leppr
Their point still stands by your analogy. There is no plot of land over which
a chain has been put by Steam, users can still acquire videogames outside of
proprietary platforms as easily on desktop PCs as they could before Steam was
created. The only thing they are extracting rent from is their own brand and
infrastructure.

Smartphone OS vendors make it hard to venture outside their walled gardens,
not Steam. There are no exclusivity deals (afaik), no all-encompassing SDK
developers are incentivized to integrate with (Google Play services), even
SteamOS doesn't lock users down.

~~~
zaroth
It’s a wonderful point, and the fact that _even Steam_ can monetize an App
Store under those conditions just goes to show that these delivery channels
are actually incredibly valuable and _worth_ a significant percentage cut due
to the difficult real-world problems that they solve, and the access to a
customer base ready to pay money for your product (versus pirate it).

~~~
brylie
They are perfectly capable of operating at a flat-rate service cost.

~~~
zaroth
I'm not sure what you mean by this? Anyone is perfectly capable of operating
their business at a flat-rate pricing structure versus a commission structure.
That's the beauty of our economy; that companies can make these decisions for
themselves and their customers can then vote with their wallets which solution
they like better.

Steam is the perfect example because it started from nothing, did not leverage
any existing device-base to shoe-horn it's solution, and they exist in a
marketplace littered with a long list of failed competitors who couldn't beat
them in a fair fight.

And yet still people will hate on them for nothing more than being successful
apparently, and offering a service that game studios throw fist-fulls of money
at.

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alaenix
Junior Qt/C++ developer here. In my opinion, the Qt community is poorly
developed and not booming at all currently, which I greatly regret.

What are you thoughts about this Marketplace and it's future potential impact
? Is it gonna promote the open source and "plugin" community around Qt/QML ?
It seems pretty "company" oriented.

~~~
ldiracdelta
Interesting statement, but I see a thriving community asking and answering
questions on stackoverflow:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/qt](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/qt)

