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.'"

Comments

Buy stock?

[kanweg]

If so, as open source fans, should we buy stock to help ensure that Trolltech doesn't move off the right track?

Bert

Microsoft execs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Microsoft execs

[Dr. Spork]

Aah, I see how this works. Microsoft first plants some moles into Trolltech, and soon, it will be a company that anyone with a fat wallet can buy out. Yes, one of the dangers of going public is that you never know who your new owner will turn out to be. Manchester United, probably the most famous sports team in the world, went public and the next thing you know, some Yankee tycoon bought all their stock. Huge protests from the fans did nothing. These are the perils of going public - so seeing this done by a company that codes and maintains such an important componenet of Linux distributions makes me a little nervous.

Sam Kinison once said

[ReformedExCon]

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.

Re:Sam Kinison once said

[hagrin]

But don't go IPO, man. Keep it small, keep it lean, and don't let your eyes glaze over with dollar signs.

You're missing the financial reasons why companies who have offered public stcok fail and why succeed - business model, leadership, first to market and ability to keep and stregnthen market share.

Personally, I was friends with the creators of theglobe.com and they went public with a poorly formed business model (IMO), leadership that was highly inexperienced and during a time where anything ending in .com received huge amounts of private funding.

The act of going public alone doesn't doom a company so I definitely don't understand your concerns. Did going public hurt Google?

Like with any IPO, read through the prospectus offered, evaluate the industry and company specific risks, evaluate the company leadership, market share, the technologies involved and competition. Those things will determine the success or failure post-IPO.

Re:This is not a suprise

[SSpade]

Well, the quality of service has gone down and the price has gone up, so that would fit the IPO speculation.

They're a nice company and have a nice product, but Qt4 isn't quite ready for prime-time yet, and (despite claims to the contrary) they've discontinued support for Qt3 (if your bug doesn't cause a SEGV, it doesn't get fixed). This is not a great situation if you're a paying Trolltech customer and have 100kloc based on Qt3 to support.

And, right now, I'm waiting for a return call from their product folks that was promised "same day" over a week ago...

Re:This is not a suprise

[SSpade]

Sure, they've fixed a bunch. This is the first release that'll run on OS X 10.4, for instance (so, yes, I've had production releases of my code using pre-release snapshots of Qt3.3.5, as Qt 3.3.4 doesn't run on Tiger).

But if you report a bug to TrollTech - and I'm talking some fairly serious bugs, like, say, QTabBar fails horribly in QAquaStyle or drawing chords doesn't work at all or docked widgets cannot be resized to smaller than 245 pixels high or... - then you'll be told "It'll be fixed in Qt 4.1". When pressed they'll tell you that their policy is not to fix anything other than critical bugs in Qt3.

Showstopper bugs in Qt3 are not even being worked on, let alone fixed. The stock answer is "it'll be fixed in a future release of Qt4". Quite apart from the rewrite needed to move from Qt3 to Qt4 not being trivial, Qt4 doesn't work yet. The latest release I have of Qt4 on my Mac... well... the included tools don't work, let alone the libraries. Assistant has appalling focus problems, such that the Index box doesn't work at all, just as one example.

(To be fair, I suspect that Windows and Linux users have a better situation, as Qt3 for those platforms is more mature than Qt3 for OS X - but given I'm paying for a TrioPack license I expect all three platforms to be supported).

Once Qt4 is finished it'll be nice, but the currently available versions are early-beta quality, at best. And developers using Qt3 are being told that bugs will not be fixed, ever, and they should migrate to Qt4, where the bugs will be fixed eventually.

So what happens to Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

.. when the shareholders want more profit?

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 /Qt and Mac/Qt.

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.

Re:So what happens to Qt

[10Ghz]

why is only TrollTech allowed to have a GPLed library in KDE

Because TT created the toolkit, and KDE decided to use it in their desktop? And since TT created the toolkit, they have the right to license it as they see fit?

and charge money for its use?

What? you have to pay TT in order to use their GPL'ed toolkit? That's news to me! Here I have been deluding myself that you can freely use GPL'ed stuff without having to pay anyone one dime. I know that the KDE-folks don't pay any money to TT, so I guess we should turn them in? My Linux-distro is GPL'ed as well, yet I didn't pay one dime for it. I guess I'm a pirate or something....

Oh, you are talking about using the toolkit for proprietary developement? So what gives them the right to charge money for it? Ummmm, the fact that THEY CREATED THE FUCKING TOOLKIT AND THEY THEREFORE HAVE THE RIGHT TO LICENSE IT AS THEY SEE FIT? If you don't want to pay for it, then DON'T USE IT! Seriously, this is not rocket-science!!

If you are such a hardcore non-proprietary guy, why aren't you pushing for the KDE project to fork Qt under the GPL

Uh, it's already under the GPL, you fucking asshat. Only thing KDE and others care is that is the toolkit available to them as free software. And it is. it doesn't matter to them at all if TT also sell the toolkit under a different license. It's not relevant to KDE at all, they care about the Qt they use.

Am I going to tell TT not to sell Qt? Of course not! I don't care if they sell it, since it has exactly zero relevance to me. I care about the free version of the toolkit. if TT decides to sell is under a different license as well, more power to them! That doesn't take away from KDE in any shape or form.

That you should not have the choice of license forced upon you just because you chose the use a library?

Like I said, you are NOT forced to use Qt. Don't like it's license? Fine, use something else and quit your moronic whining. TT is under no obligation to satisfy your whims.

What makes you think that you have somekind of god-given right to use Qt in any way you choose? I mean, you have lots of toolkits at your disposal. You can freely choose to use any of them. Then why this tirade against Qt? Since you are not forced to use it, then surely it's not your problem how they decide to license their toolkit? just use some other toolkit and be done with it.

or do you also want a pony and whine when you are not given one?

Do you realise that it costs more to develop Qt apps than it does to develop Windows apps

Yet many people use Qt for their developement-tasks. why is that? But hey, if what you are saying is true, then TT is surely on it's way to destruction, right? I mean, why would anyone pay one dime for Qt? But the strange thing is that many companies DO pay for Qt! Strange, huh? I guess they see some value in it which makes it worth the money?

Calm down Jihad-boy.

Funny, considering that it's you who is making moronic comments and demands. you seem to be on a Jihad to force others to give you more free stuff, which you could use to earn lots of money.

Just because you've had your hypocrisy exposed for all to see is no reason to get all upset.

What "hypocrisy" are you talking about here?

I don't quite like the idea.

[AsparagusChallenge]

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.

Re:This is not a suprise

[XO]

see, here's the problem:

  You are expecting Unix developers to care one bit about the smallest Unix market segment there is. And one that has so much other stuff jammed into it, that not even God knows where your issues are.
  If the problems amongst the software were as bad as you say they are, do you think there'd even BE a Mac release? From what you're talking , not a single part of it functions.. so, either grab the source, and get to work, or figure out where the problem on your system is, since i doubt it's shared by everyone.