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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.'"
If so, as open source fans, should we buy stock to help ensure that Trolltech doesn't move off the right track?
Bert
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.
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.
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.
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.
KDE Free Qt Foundation:
The KDE Free Qt Foundation is an organization founded by Trolltech and the KDE e.V. in 1998 with the purpose to secure the availability of the Qt toolkit for the development of Free Software and in particular for the development of the K Desktop Environment (KDE).
Agreement page 1
2 3 4
The question of course is: what is a new release? Just another version number?
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
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.
Not necessarily. The old owners (in this case: mostly TT-employees) could still hold majority of the shares. You do not have to sell all your shares, you could just sell some shares.
Previous version of Qt would get re-licensed under BSD-license, as per agreement between KDE and TT. Also, KDE_folks (and anyone else interested) would pick up the lates free version of Qt, and start working on it. So there would be to Qt's: the commercial Qt provided by TT available on Mac/Windows only, and free-software Qt, developed by KDE and others, available for Linux, Mac and Windows.
If TT did what you fear, those proprietary applications would do just fine. In fact, they would flourish, since Qt would be under the BSD-license. That said, I don't care about proprietary apps. I find it strange that people are pushing free software. But when Qt and TrollTech is concered, those same people get their panties in a bunch because you can't write proprietary apps with it for free. Tough luck I say. Why don't you also whine because you can't take Linux-kernel and turn it in to something proprietary?
Huh? The toolkit is GPL'ed! I really can't believe when I see people whine because some piece of software is licensed under the GPL! I can see why someone would complain when some sofdtware is proprietary and you are dependant on it, but this is GPL'ed software! But if you don't like it, go use GTK+ and Gnome. No-one is stopping you.
Since when did free software and Linux turn from being about *gasp* free software, in to "we must satisfy the whims of companies who want to write proprietary software!". With attitude like that, why don't you people just stick to Windows?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Oh, and TrollTech doesn't really belong in the Linux category, either. They've been around since before Linus, let alone before Linux.
TrollTech was founded in 1994, while Linux was released in 1991. Linus himself was released in 1969, proving you wrong on all counts.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
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.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/