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.

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: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.

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.