How else do you fund such a horrendously difficult thing? There is a reason there are no other cross platform UIs that are QT’s equal. Creating a good looking cross platform UI that supports things like accessibility and provides a close to native app experience (or can) is a real slog of a programming project. It must also be constantly maintained as native APIs change out from under it, hardware advances (e.g. higher DPI displays, HDR), and UI trends change.
Pay for Qt or pay for developer time to maintain multiple versions of your UI. Your pick. Qt is probably cheaper in most cases.
I agree completely. If I made a commercial app I would pay.
My concern is that I don't trust Qt Company now to not change the rules on me later, or hike the price, etc. I would choose Qt for commercial solely because I already know it from building FLOSS apps. If I need to learn something else for FLOSS, I'm not going to stick with Qt. There's limited space in my brain for expertise and I want something that will meet all needs.
Qt is amazing and I love it, but an amazing thing I love but can't use/rely on isn't worth much.
The thing is, of course, that you don't need to trust the Qt Company. That's why we have the KDE-Free Qt foundation, and that alone makes Qt the best choice for anyone who developers software that can use LGPL libraries, commercial or open source.
I can confirm Spotify GNU/Linux client appears to use libcef. I was surprised! I had read some old Internet posts that claimed Spotify GNU/Linux client was using Qt. (I have no idea about old versions of the GNU/Linux client.)
When I run command "ldd" on my Spotify GNU/Linux client binary, I see "libcef.so". And, I can see:
Pay for Qt or pay for developer time to maintain multiple versions of your UI. Your pick. Qt is probably cheaper in most cases.