The thing notable about every company I've seen relying on GPL code is that what they sell are services/support. People pay Red Hat to be able to email someone when they have a problem. That's it. That's the business mode. Same with MariaDB (MySQL is a little unique in that it was purchased by Oracle, and I can't speak to Qt having no familiarity with it).
That works for B2B positioning, since the cost of support staff scales well when each new customer is worth thousands of dollars in revenue...and doesn't work well for B2C where the cost of support staff won't scale well when each new customer is worth a few bucks.
The thing notable about every company I've seen relying on GPL code is that what they sell are services/support. People pay Red Hat to be able to email someone when they have a problem. That's it. That's the business mode. Same with MariaDB (MySQL is a little unique in that it was purchased by Oracle, and I can't speak to Qt having no familiarity with it).
That works for B2B positioning, since the cost of support staff scales well when each new customer is worth thousands of dollars in revenue...and doesn't work well for B2C where the cost of support staff won't scale well when each new customer is worth a few bucks.