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Interview With Trolltech's CEO and CTO Eirik Eng
jlp2097 writes "There is a great and lengthy interview at the The Dot with Eirik Eng, CEO of Trolltech, and Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project and CTO of Trolltech. They talk about the recent X(Free86) trouble, accessibility in QT, Trolltech's finances, Qtopia, the OS X Port and a GPL'd Windows QT - it's probably not going to happen. And, did you know that Qt is pronounced 'Cute' by its creators?"
The second link is bad ... Looks like the author forgot the http:// or something.
At work, we went through a phase once of calling people who were doing X "X-boy". E.g., I was doing some email stuff, so people called me "email-boy". Well, one programmer was learning Qt, and as he left one evening, someone called out "Goodnight, cutie-boy!". Man, was his face red when he realized what that sounded like. :-)
I also heard that GTK is pronounced "Gittuk" by the gnome hackers...
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Another project where the creators don't event know how to pronounce the name of the project? I run into this all the time.
First, mod check--Hello? Funny? I don't really believe it--maybe I'll get to meta-mod it!
Second, I think of this as a strength--if your personal tastes don't lie within QT, you can still use something else. If you don't like VB or VC, then you are stuck with one or two alternatives in Winland.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Hello this is TrollTech, and we pronounce QT as "Cute"
a la Linux
While I agree with what you're saying, I do have to say that companies like Sun have a point. They simply can't embrace a toolkit like QT without forcing their customers into unexpected costs. QT is far superior to GTK (although Sun is helping GTK catch up), but the Unix companies already did this once with Motif. They're unlikely to do it again.
That being said, TrollTech should continue to serve their customers and develop a great product. Those who are willing to absorb the costs of QT will find themselves with a great product.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
wxWidgets has a huge following because it is truly cross-platform, with the same [free] licensing.
I would be using Qt/PyQt if it had a non-commercial (or preferably GPL) Windows license, but for now I'm stuck with wxPython - which really isn't as nice as Qt, although sometimes looks better due to native LnF.
I don't see the point of having GPL Linux *and Mac* versions without Windows, just because of the lame excuse "well Windows isn't GPL", it really bugs me, I don't want to write free software that won't work on Windows (and I'm far from a M$ advocate).
MacOSX isn't OSS, it's proprietary Apple stuff that they hacked on top of an OSS OS, so come up with another excuse TT....
And before anyone mentions the non-commercial Qt with the book - that is a very limited version (personal use, non-ditributable), doesn't work with PyQt, and is out-of-date already.
Argh, rant over!
#include <sig.h>
I feel much relieved now...
There seems to be no undisputed linux anything. This can be a good thing because it encourages competition and allows people to go in different directions, but it also has the detrimental effect of not having any project be the best it could be because it doesn't have the entire community working on it.
_____
Thank you.
If I am not wrong you need to buy seperate s/w for that kind of thing in windows . ( windows users correct me if I am wrong).
Besides adding accessibility features makes KDE very much a candidate for use in Govt. work and any other place where accessibility features are a must.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
I like to pronounce FAQ as Fa-Q
I don't try to be right, I just try to make people think
That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.
Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.
If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.
I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).
Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.
Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.
Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.
Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.
- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,
Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil
I am a developer who believes in cross-platform development. However, I do most of my development in a Windows environment. I write code in Windows, test in Windows, and release it from Windows, and everything I've worked on is OSS. However, according to Trolltech, I don't exist. Why do they assume that because the OS I happen to develop on isn't open source there isn't an open source community in that niche? They comment that most Windows users perfer shareware, however, that is not the case. I find that there are a number of Windows users who are wanting to use open source programs for their own work and yet here Qt is preventing us from using their tools because they feel the users aren't there. I find this an unfortunate development.
A little learning never hurt anyone.
> a GPL'd Windows QT - it's probably not going to happen.
Well, sort of. At the very least, it won't be done with Trolltech's support.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I hear that... I'm just now starting to work on a project I'm coding in Python. I'd love to use PyQT, but one of my reasons for using Python is the portability. Why the hell would I choose a a cross-platform windowing API that is free (for non-commercial) for all but the OS family with the largest market share?
Yes, yes, it's their code and they can choose to do whatever they want with it. Well, I'll choose to use wxWindows instead...
It just kills me that they justify their GPL'd releases for Linux and MacOS X by helping the Free software community and yet it appears to be a completely alien idea to them (according to the interview) that just maybe there are some GPL developers out there that want to release software that runs on MS Windows.
" just because of the lame excuse "well Windows isn't GPL""
That's _NOT_ the reason they give. The reason they gave is that too many commercial companies used the GPL version of the library in their commercial software instead of using the pricy commercial version of the library, and they said it's impossible to go and sue all of them.
^_^
"EE (laughing): As some people mentioned on the dot, it has partly to do with finances, sales and Trolltech's business model. Another point is the fact that Windows is a closed source Operating System. There is no community for Free Software development under Windows."
n Office
Well it sure as hell will not evolve using QT! This is just a load of monkey muffins. I use
Eclipse
Netbeans
FireFox
Thunderbird
Ope
Perl
Python
DevCpp
GCC
and MySql on my windows box. No free software comunity by butt.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Feel Free to write your own Toolkit and license it any way you want. Trolltech is a business and if companies want to develop commercial or closed source apps they can pay.
"QT being commercial/GPL is a hinderance to commercial software for Linux."
No it isn't, companies who want to take advantage of Trolltech's work without paying like they normally do on the Win32 platform are the problem. Sorry but your arguement has been debunked about a billion times over. If you can quote one big commercial company who said "The license fee for QT is too expensive so we won't be developing any commercial apps for the Linux" I'll eat my hat.
And Lastly as another wise person once said here, very sorry I don't have your name I just have a bunch of quotse from the last gtk vs qt debate.
" The cost of a license for commercial development is not a valid argument. If a company develops an application for sale, the cost of a license is a fraction of the overall cost to develop, market, and maintain a product. As far as development kits go, the decision on which dev kit that gets chosen is based on quality, which will drive the cost of development in the long run, and company politics."
You look at windows and Visual Basic and Visual C, those are all anyone would ever need in windows land.
Wrong. There are plenty of non-Microsoft tools available. To name a few open source or OSS-friendly tools: ActivePerl, MinGW, CygWin, Visual-MinGW, GTK+, Eclipse, Java/NetBeans, et al. I use most of those to develop Windows applications rather than Microsoft's offerings. The only thing missing is a good GUI toolkit that is open source (sorry, Java GUIs are fugly), or at least open-source compatible, and Qt fits the bill. Unfortunately, TrollTech refuses to release a free version for Windows because there is no community (bullshit) and trolls like you think Microsoft makes the only decent Windows tools (bullshit).
If projects like OpenOffice and Mozilla can have faith in Windows users and developers, why not TrollTech? TrollTech could help the OSS community make huge strides toward Linux adoption if they would help bridge the gap.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I know that some people are against having Windows versions of OSS software, but I don't agree. It is important to get Windows users to use cross-platform stuff like OOo and Mozilla. This will help prepare them to switch to another OS when the time is right for them.
The same could be said for developers. If Qt was a viable option for Windows developers then many would use it and they would be better prepared for, and more likely to switch to, another OS.
This seems like a fairly straight-forward argument, which is why many important OSS projects make a big effort to work on Windows as well as Linux. I realize though, that none of this is within TT's mandate. They are a company, not a project, so their job is to make money. Sometimes this coincides with doing what is best for the OSS and Linux communities, but I am amazed at how often this is not the case.
So, though I am a C++ developer, and I believe that Qt is much better than GTK, I'll have to side with GTK for Linux.
What is Ralph J. Yarro of Canopy infamy doing on the Trolltech board of directors?
Early 1999 Trolltech had helped Utah-based Caldera to create their award-winning graphical Linux installer. Around the same time we also started developing Qt/Embedded for the embedded Linux market. Lineo, another Utah company, was the king of embedded Linux at the time, and they needed a product like Qt/Embedded for Linux-based consumer devices.
Canopy was a major VC and stakeholder in both Caldera and Lineo. Ralph Yarro, President and CEO of Canopy, recognized that Trolltech could help two of their porfolio companies succeed and decided to make an investment in Trolltech.
I met Ralph Yarro in Utah in August 1999 and we agreed on an investment term-sheet (with very reasonable terms for Trolltech, by the way).
Did we do the right thing? Definitely. Canopy was the first investor in Trolltech and their investment made it possible for us to grow the company and build new products. Canopy was later followed by Borland and a syndicate of three Norwegian VCs.
As part of the investment agreement, each investor got a seat on the board: Ralph Yarro from Canopy, Dale Fuller from Borland and Ingar Ostby from Northzone. Ralph Yarro has been on our board since late 1999.
Sorry, sitting on the board means "influence".
Ralph Yarro has about zero influence over how we run the company. When you have a person on your board that might have a conflict of interest in certain areas you will make sure that this person does not participate in all discussions or get access to all company information.
What is financial relationship between SCO/Canopy and Trolltech?
The deal in 1999 also involved a stock swap with Caldera. As all of you know, Caldera became SCO a couple of years ago and changed their Linux agenda. Trolltech owned stock in SCO but we decided to sell them last year after the interview took place. But SCO still owns a tiny portion of Trolltech shares.
Does Trolltech owe money to SCO/Canopy?
No.
Does Canopy have contractual rights to seats on the board?
Yes, this is part of the investment contract we have with all our investors.
Does SCO/Canopy have warrants or other agreements to take control of Trolltech later?
No, are you nuts? We would be pretty stupid to sign an investment contract that would give a minor (or even major) shareholder the ability to take control of our company.
Do I support Canopy's or SCO's actions? No way.
Haavard