Slashdot Mirror
TrollTech to IPO?
burninginside writes "Yahoo is reporting that Trolltech, the world's biggest producer of Linux software for mobile devices, may be heading public. 'Sources close to the company' said the move may come as soon as 12 months but the official word is still that it 'is not in our immediate plans.'"
Hmm.. around here troll-techs are usually not seen, as they are below the threashold, but Trolltech is about to go public?
If so, as open source fans, should we buy stock to help ensure that Trolltech doesn't move off the right track?
Bert
Here's a link to another news story with a bit more info: Trolltech
You forgot to mention that TrollTech hired two former Microsoft executives recently -- added them to their board of directors, supposedly to help them go public.
What are you TALKING about? Trolltech is the maker of Qt GUI Toolkit and the embedded environment QTopia
DON'T DO IT!!!!!
He was talking about getting married or something. I don't remember.
But going public has been the ruin of many poor companies, and God knows I've been part of some. It ties you to the stockholders and limits the ways in which you can reasonably spend your capital. It also risks you losing some of your top talent who may just decide that being rich and staying at home is better than sticking around to watch the stock prices fall through the floor while they slave away 12 hours a day.
Trolltech has a very good business model. They sell Qt licenses to embedded device makers (in addition to selling software licenses to desktop application developers). Since Gartner expects devices like cellphones and other devices not normally built with graphical UIs to be overtaken in the coming years by "smart" devices that need a solid GUI, not to mention easily programmable APIs, Trolltech is positioned very well in this area.
But don't go IPO, man. Keep it small, keep it lean, and don't let your eyes glaze over with dollar signs.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
As long as Trolltech continues to make a developer kit so that us less financially inclined can just complile and test software on their platform for free, I will be happy.
I'm having fun with my Zaurus, thanks. Keep the free tools coming!
Hopefully a public float won't mean that the shareholders get greedy and cut off the free stuff in order to profit more. Hopefully these new ex-Microsoft execs quit Microsoft to get away from Microsoft's corporate practices.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Usually what happens when something goes IPO is their product offerings will go up in price before the IPO is sought.
I hope either way that they continue to develop fine products and keep the prices at a reasonable level.
Their prices are purely driven by what the market is prepared to pay, and from it seems the introduction to these tools at a commerical level is fairly steep in price for a small commerical developer.
On a side note, I would love to see a new ISO C++ standard (royalty free) to especially cater for cross platform GUI development.
For any of you wondering who Trolltech is and why you would care about them, their biggest claim to fame is that they develop Qt, the GUI used by KDE.
Does this mean that "-1 Troll" in the following comments is good? I'm so confused!
And why couldn't a platform be made that is distributed/licensed freely or cheaply - thereby killing Trolltechs profits? Do they monopolize patents on a cellphone gui or something?
Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
If they really are planning to IPO, please drop the theme song. It sounds like a childrens song that parents sing to their newborns. You know the one that goes:
"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy, when skies are grey."
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/sunshine.ht m
Listen to the song and compare.
Last time I checked the GPL version was free. If you used GPL software and did not release your sources, you are in violation of the GPL. You suck
"Hey kids! I went to the VA Linux IPO party and all I got was a sweatshirt with a penguin shaped zipper pull-tab thingee and a huge AMT debt! Whoopie!"
No, there wasn't much point to this post.
.. when the shareholders want more profit?
/Qt and Mac/Qt.
The problem with doing an IPO is that you lose a lot of control of your company. You might end up being taken over by someone else without your original vision.
What happens to KDE if the major shareholders decides to stop developing Linux/Qt and discontinue it, while keeping Windows
But Qt is GPL you say? Yes, but where does that leave proprietary applications? It would be impossible and illegal to develop proprietary applications for KDE using Qt and the Windows and Mac versions could quickly become imcompatible.
This is why having ONE company have complete control over the desktop APIs is a bad idea.
"Oh, you have to talk to Trolltech" was never on the list of things Sun wanted to tell their independent software developers and the major reason Sun went with Gnome.
Unless you are really lucky like the searching and indexing companies, you can be easily killed by being a public company.
Your publicly perceived value is the one of your stocks.
While your real value is the one that yelds from your products and services when sold and used.
Which one is more important?
I hope that the tie-guys at TrollTech will take more care about technology than finance!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
QT has bindings to scripting languages, if you prefer those over C++.
I don't know where you get that C is faster than C++ to the extent that it matters for processors that will be running current-gen DE's anyways. C++ may be slower, but it's definitely led to QT being a very loosely coupled collection of tools, and thus a strong foundation for a great desktop, KDE.
QT is a great library for developers who want to target both Windows and Linux/UNIX desktops -- and companies can pay for the license to keep source hidden, if they like. Along with maybe Java SWT, QT probably has the greatest cross-platform desktop application viability for companies.
KDE is just a significant value-add for QT apps, allowing them to be highly integrated with their DE.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
I'd buy shares from them. They sell a quality product for a reasonable price.
But I'd prefer Trolltech to stay private as it is now. The reason being, if I remember correctly, their employees own more than half of the actions, I thing over the 70% even. That sounds good, because the ones that do the work have a reason to worry for doing it good. If that has anything to do with their current quality I don't want to see this changing.
That's not even comparing apples and oranges - that's comparing cars, toasters and computers.
Let's get this straight. C++ is a programming language (and it's standard library). Java is a programming language, a standard library and a virtual machine. .net is a framework that can be used by several very different languages.
> You can just feel the object oriented speed penalty in both kde and trolltech windows, compared gtk or win32 api c.
Sure. What about comparing programs that actually do the same instead of some that just somehow look similar? There is no such thing as an "object oriented speed penalty". OOP is a way of doing things that's often used even in languages that don't support it. OOP languages just provide some help and eye candy for doing things the OO way. Your beloved gtk API is definitely object oriented. If you don't believe me (and can't see it from the API), just check http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk.htm l and read: "GTK+ has a C-based object-oriented architecture that allows for maximum flexibility.".
This "oop is bad" example is just ridiculous and has nothing to do with the actual experience in any OO language. The opposite is true. Normally you have something like:
... and still don't have any reasonable error handling, which makes the code much worse readable.In an OO language with operator overloading you would get: result = Tsomething(specification) + TSomething(otherSpecification)
About your "suggestion" to use C as an intermediate language - good morning, there are things that can't (or can only with a some performance hit) be translated into C.
Praising BASIC really is an evil idea. You should't expose novice programmers to this pest when there are so much cleaner languages around which make it harder to write spaghetti code and shoot yourself in the foot than BASIC. For example, you already mentioned Python.
By the way, good morning, Java bytecode does not have to run interpreted. There are both available: Just in time compilers and ordinary compilers.
Perhaps you should also notice that C++ is not an object oriented language. Java is. C++ just allows you to do OOP. Or ordinary imperative programming. Or generic programming. Or mix them all.
Reading your comment once again I really get the impression I am just feeding a troll. Perhaps you are not, but I just can't let it uncommented as "insightful" when you obviously don't know what you are talking about.
It seems to me there is a real risk in Trolltech's going public that another larger company with objectives that are not really compatible with open source could buy a controlling stake in Trolltech and then be in a position to implement a number of closed-source strategies which might include making Qt closed-source, making the Qt development tools closed source, or even ending all Qt development.
Scroogle
Hello, meet the KDE Free Qt Foundation, founded in 1998 exactly to prevent this kind of problem. In case Trolltech ownership changes and tries to snatch Qt from under our feet, Qt goes BSD-license by contractual agreement.
This being said, much as I like Qt from an engineering point of view, and have appreciated my contacts with the Trolls so far, I don't know what to make of that IPO. This might be a good time to sit back and watch and wait.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Back when Borland was developing Kylix they went with Trolltech and the QT library for CLX. Borland had invested money in the company at that time.
I wonder if they held onto the investment or did they bail out?
Then release it totally GPL'd.
Maybe they could find another use for it too....
Modded "flamebait"
Nothing to see here just more flamebait for the trolls to come out of hiding w00t
I want to see a 5, Troll. It'd be cool, and sort of on-topic. I know it's possible, and I can take the karma hit. Wouldn't it be cool?
If you look at the previous jobs of Juha Christensen (Microsoft's Mobile Devices division and Symbian before that), and Tod Nielsen (senior VP of technology marketing at Oracle, Microsoft), it is obvious that Trolltech is strongly going into the smartphone OS market. They could bundle some Linux based embedded OS and add QTopia onto that and sell it as a complete solution + some good tools for developing apps for this mobile platform.
If they make some success on this market, Qt/{X11,Windows,MacOSX} would lessen its importance as a revenue source for Trolltech and subsequently end up fully open and relicensed under LGPL/BSD. I think it could be a good move for all of us.
That bloat example is just plain idiotic.
The 'NORMAL' example is simplistic, and the 'BLOATED' example is contrived. You can demonstrate exactly the same level of bloat and simplicity for that exact operation in any language, object oriented or not.
assuming the 'normal' example is BASIC, which it most looks like, then A and B are numbers - primitives, then the java example is actually
System.out.println(a + b);
Or a C++ example is
cout << (a + b);
Now, lets say that a and b are _not_ primitives, what if they're a complex type of some description.
In C++ the example would remain:
cout << (a + b);
In java, it would most likely be:
System.out.println(a.add(b));
What would it be in BASIC, or C?
most likely it'd be something like -
complex_type_add(a, b);
a_string = complex_type_to_string(a);
printf("%s\n", a_string);
free(a_string);
Object oriented programming adds a _little_ bloat to simplistic cases, but greatly simplifies complex cases.
If you believe that it inherently causes bloat, then you're never planning to move beyond "Hello, World".
and yes, IHBT.
Advanced users are users too!
Only if they also release their software. If you only use the software internally you can be both GPL and closed source.
No it can't. Open Source means that all of the customers of the software have access to the source code (and a mangled version of the FSF's four freedoms). The software is still Open Source, it is just not widely distributed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I would recommend Smalltalk. It's a fully OO language (unlike C++ which is an abomination) and much clearer than Java. It was designed at a teaching language by the guy who invented OOP. After you've used Smalltalk for a bit, you will start judging other OO languages by how much they suck in comparison to Smalltalk. So far, Objective-C is the language that I've used that sucks the least in comparison to Smalltalk (and it gains c compatibility in exchange for sucking a bit, so it's a trade-off I'm willing to make to access large libraries of legacy C code).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Better to get people who have a safer background when determining life or death decisions for the the company.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Sources close I, for one, prefer open sources
"Sources close to the company" - don't mention the words "close" and "source" in one sentence with "Trolltech". It scares me.
"biggest producer of Linux software for mobile devices"
This isn't meant as a flamebait, but where are these mobile devices with linux on it?
The Zaurus isn't sold outside Japan (O own a SL 5500), the (still very few) Motorola phones come with an development environment that supports Java only (nevertheless I'll buy an A780 soon just for the bulit in GPS navigation it has in European models).
It's rather difficult to find a device with qt/embedded that's programmable in C++. The only thing that I can think of is the new Nokia surfing tablet, but IIRC it's not available yet.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Developers, Developers, Developers !!!!!!
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
It's rather difficult to find a device with qt/embedded that's programmable in C++. The only thing that I can think of is the new Nokia surfing tablet, but IIRC it's not available yet.
Actually, the Nokia is/will be GTK based. Even though the 770 isn't out, you can download and play with it's Debianesque OS (called Maemo) here
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
Yeah, I'll be sure to invest. Last year I bought Red Hat at 30 bucks a share and now it's somewhere around 14 or 15 bucks. Oh and I thought I would be cool and I bought VA Software stock at 2 bucks a share. Now it's down to about 1.50. I think I'll just invest in Apple or MS...
-Dipster
This news has been going around since the dotbomb era.
Oh, and TrollTech doesn't really belong in the Linux category, either. They've been around since before Linus, let alone before Linux.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
No it can't. Open Source means that all of the customers of the software
In fact, it is not distributed at all. "The company" is the legal entity. None of the employees own a copy any more than they own the Windows installation they work on. "Customers of the software" doesn't include delivered services either. Just because I rent a webhotel run on Apache I can not get a copy of the Apache source code from them. Thus the difference between GPL and closed source software in zero that respect - you don't have to give the source to anyone, as long as you don't distribute the binaries to anyone.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Companies going public are required to list all the dangers to their business model and all possible things that could go wrong as part of their full disclosure to potential investors.
Reading these lists can be quite an educational experience.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I am puzzled as to how software licensed under the GPL is not "Totally GPL'd" because it is also available under a different license. If you use Qt under the GPL, it is GPL code, plain and simple. It is completely irrelevant to you if someone else has paid Trolltech to use Qt under different terms.
But the OP got one thing right - Java sucks. My two biggest complaints are boat load of memory requirements and a heavily lacking, pig GUI. (They claim it's getting better with the Mustang release but I checked it and the fonts look only slightly better than the original ones but no where near the MS native ones.) Sun failed miserably in these areas.
....Then Microsoft can buy the place up and turn it into a parking lot; thus eliminating some of the competition for Windows CE.
Bleck.
Regards;
I just read the KDE foundation Trolltech agreement.
p hp#updated_agreement
Link is here: http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.
What is says is very, very simple. The KDE foundation is permitted to license the latest QT Free edition under any open source license, explicitly including the BSD license, as long as one of the following three conditions is meet:
1. QT Free edition is not updated for 12 months.
2. QT Free edition is not updated within 12 months of the release of a new QT proprietary edition (i.e. QT4 comes out, non-gpl, no QT4 Free edition)
3. Unanimous consent of the KDE foundation boardmembers.
That's all. No one, at all, should fear that Trolltech can take QT away, or that a large company (say Microsoft) could purchase Trolltech, and take QT away.
The absolute worst that could happen would be Trolltech stopping development. That's it.
With this agreement, Trolltech irrevocably ties themselves to the free software movement. QT is under no threat at all.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
The stock plummets. The CEO is quoted as saying "YHBT YHL HAND".
most likely it'd be something like - Far worse than that; for example, you forgot to allocate the memory for the string. And you may not know how much is going to be required, so you can't safely use a fixed buffer...
A more realistic C example would beNo, that is not at all contrived: programming in C really is often like that. Of course, that was assuming a Win32-style API. Maybe there are saner APIs out there, but Win32 really does make you jump through that sort of hoop all the time.
"biggest producer of Linux software for mobile devices" This isn't meant as a flamebait, but where are these mobile devices with linux on it?
br> In China, where the world biggest producers of smartphones are. Easiest way to find them, try TT customers page.
I've learned not the believe everything I hear from "sources close to the company", unless they are Open Sources.
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
Sure. What about comparing programs that actually do the same instead of some that just somehow look similar? There is no such thing as an "object oriented speed penalty".
Actually, there is the well known "Stepanov's abstraction penalty" related to many OOP concepts. In C++, this effect can be minimized by using more modern compilers and attempting to understand what the compiler does behind the scenes. The advantage with C over C++/OOP for speed is that the operations behind performed are more visible in the written program, and can be tweaked.
Personally, I like C++ much better than C for programming. The language enhances my productivity, even if there is a cost associated with some of the OOP constructs I choose to use.
Also, in the past, kde startup has been known for ridiculous start times as the dynamic linker is tries to resolve all the symbols from the large number of shared libraries it uses.
Sure, there is some overhead involved with an object oriented approach (though much can be saved by good compilers, just as you say) - but this guy was talking of an "object oriented speed penalty... compared gtk... " - and since gtk is object oriented, this must refer to some magic speed-eater and bloat-bringer that is tightly coupled with OO languages, and I didn't meet this beast yet.
see this post.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Start your reading here.
> Far worse than that; for example, you forgot to allocate the memory for the string. And you may not know how much is going to be required, so you can't safely use a fixed buffer...
no I didn't - mine was a best case C example (to be consistent with a best case C++ or Java example). I assumed that the _to_string function allocated it for me - It'd be silly trying to allocate it from the outside, as like you say there's no way of knowing how big it would need to be.
Of course, I didn't do error checking on the return of get_string, and assumed that _add was infallible, and often C APIs do leave all temporary buffer allocation to the user, as inside out as that may seem.
So code like your example is necesary all too frequently.
Advanced users are users too!
I'm not a computer professional, I've always known that - that stuff takes years of forging - if nothing else this dismal rating shows it very clearly. I was offered to take on writing some database app for a company wide implementation, that worked very well in a single local department. Now I can see just how right I was to decline, over incompetence. I'm willing to work around the edges to interface the local needs to some main company wide database system, with my self learned programming skills, and bang together something that works, and works very well, but to run a company wide business on it, to make me create that company wide db that everything depends on? Give me a break. Hire professionals who have a chest fully decorated with medals for that kind of stuff, who have really chosen this kind of thing as their profession.
Still, nobody commented on how unecessarily difficult programming is made. Is it wrong to ask that the programming interface of a computer to be more human? I don't want just the user interface to be easy to use and human, or just the generic, widely used programs to be human - there is always that area where I need to do something for which there is no generic solution, there are always special cases, and people are left feeling very dumb, not because they can't explain what they want, or they can't write it down in correct and super-exact english terms, but because those english terms are not easily interfacable, translatable to the computer. It's worse than having to translate from english to japanese. Just because nonprofessional programmers such as business, accounting, hr and science folks cooked up a whole lot of spaghetti VB code then a real programmer got hired to straighten out the unstraightenable mess - instead it just ends up rewritten from scratch, while the professional keeps cussing at VB, like a professional surgeon cussing at the knife used by amateur surgeons, instead of cussing at the amateur incompetence - just because this is so, it doesn't mean easy VB should be eliminated, because that spaghetti code that did actually work was still preferable to no code at all, no solution and people just suffering without one, and it may never have been recognized that there was actually a spot there, a obvious need for a professional programmer, because there were directly tangible business benefits to derive. DIY programming, though dangerous, it's nowhere near as dangerous as DIY surgery.
> Still, nobody commented on how unecessarily difficult programming is made.
_ languages - Different people have different ways of expressing what they want, and different problems they want to explain to the computer, and different needs regarding how detailed the explaination has to be.
:-)
Maybe because "unecessarily difficult" implies that it would be no problem to make it easier. What do you think how many people are currently trying to improve programming languages, development environments and GUI builders? Hey, it is definitely not easy to make it easier. And you are talking about "unecessarily difficult".
>Is it wrong to ask that the programming interface of a computer to be more human?
Maybe not (see below), but it is not easy to do that. Why do you think there are so many programming languages? Just check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Programming
When you think VB is easy, that is only one side of the medal. It looks easy. Maybe it is easy to get started. But then it is quite easy to shoot yourself in the foot and to produce code that's extremely hard to maintain. Well, not as easy as with older BASIC dialects (anyone remember the times when there wasn't functions, but only GOTO and GOSUB?), but still easy enough.
And if you like talking about personal histories: I only have self learned programming skills, I am one of the science folks you mention but luckily I was exposed to different languages than BASIC (did some VB stuff, aswell, so I know why I don't like it that much).
BTW: I don't want programming interfaces to be more human. I want them to be easy to understand, precise and reliable
Maintaining code? Sometimes all you want is just to create something, make it work, and then hope it does the same thing over and over for a decade. A lot of nonreprogrammable hardware devices are designed, made, and their design no longer 'maintained' just the parts changed out as they wear off. Works pretty good for a lot of things. My mouse or keyboard here are a few years old, for instance. Same with my pen and pencil, or 900 MHz phone, or laser printer or monitor. Maintaining code is a bit over emphasised, especially as a job-security aspect for someone who can't come up with something new, and in the name of creating this new, information economy. Write a program, design a car. Make it work well. Then use it. 10 years later you can almost just start from scratch, design from scratch, and use it again for 10 years. How about something that stands the test of time? Make a software like a bridge - designed to function for 50 years before first major overhaul. If you're a software designer, like MS, go hide for 10 years until really come up with something new, insead of this get your daily patches hell that fix what we broke yesterday trying to fix something else business model. You shouldn't have to dick with software constantly if it was made to work well in the first place. I'm still on the 2.4 linux kernel. Works fine. Not even the latest version of 2.4.xx. I'd probably still be happy with a 2.2 kernel, if I had to pay for 2.4. 2.6 is free, so what. As long as it works, that's what counts. I could not say the same thing about MSDOS 6, or Windows 3.1, since I know better now, and want better. I'd buy something better than either DOS of Win31 if all the free choices were gone. But maybe even Win95 would be fine for me, in almost 2006, 10 years later, if the hardware drivers were updated. The interface had all I needed. Windows Explorer with right click menus let me take charge of my harddrive, better than File Manager. But where is the new stuff since? After all this billion dollar 'maintaining'? WinXP from the user interface standpoint is still just Win95 with different colors. OK no blue screens. But even blue screens weren't so bad, people rebooted, and life went on. I'd rather not have this constant reinventing the wheel - DDE, OLE, COM/Activex, dotNet - progress? They should have made Activex hard iron sandbox secure like java applets in the first place, and it could be something to last for 50 years. Constantly shooting yourself in the foot and make something crappy on purpose just so you can sell yet another solution later, which, mind you, comes with its own submarine load of defects as investment toward the future, is a business strategey, but not one that pleases the customer.
.h and .cpp files typing some 200 lines of code, when all you needed was pick a control, drop it on a form, double click it, type 5 lines of code that actually do someting besides instantiating the whole bells and whistles mechanism, and incorrectly destructing it later because you haven't made the right things virtual in the constructor of what you are subclassing, because you didn't think you'd ever have to subclass it - no, I'd rather not deal with that hell if I don't have to. A massive project like MS Antispyware using VB6 - go use C++! That project is big enough! My hobby program I
Classic VB was perfect for cooking up something quick, making it work, and then it just worked, over and over, for years and years. Why is everyone bitchin at how bad pre-dotnet VB was? Are you sure you're not the surgeon bitching at the surgical knifes the amateur's used, bitchin at their tool instead of their incompetence using that tool? Classic VB was perhaps not the best choice for a large project, such as MS Antispyware that does use Classic VB6 SP5 in 2005, but for everyday needs of home-programmers, hobby programmers, and small businesses you simply shouldn't have to sit down and start pulling your hair out abstracting and conceptualizing the classes and contstructors and navigate through the zoo of
Eloquent, but still quite close to trolling.
:-)
I could spend much time pointing out where you're wrong, but it looks like this is just about your personal feelings and opinion, not about arguments or technology. Write your stuff, be happy with it, but I really hope that I will never have to ask you for an additional feature or a bugfix in something you created a few months ago.
Have a nice weekend
You too! :)
I realize there are two sides to every story, and I could probably argue the maintanance side, being there for the customer, the "customer is always right even when they are not" side a lot more eloquently, but I chose to voice that side that's falling out of perspective, and doesn't get enough attention.
I'm saying that by working for Microsoft, the culture there must have rubbed off on them, whether a little or a lot or voluntarily or non-voluntarily. It is well documented that M$ is one of the least ethical companies in the IT sector and has repeatedly been found guilty of illegal business methods which range from illegal tying to false advertising. What I'm saying is that it would be a bad idea for TrollTech to bring in people straight from that environment without a cooling off period at another business, just to see where these people really are. That is especially important when making long term strategic decisions, like the consideration of an IPO, which contains high risk.
Running a business is not just crunching a column of numbers. It's about getting things done and that needs a lot of common goals and values or else the team won't work smoothly (or may not work at all).
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.