TrollTech to IPO?

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Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday September 6, 2005 @05:58PM from the unconfirmed-yet-still-interesting dept.

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.'"

6 of 150 comments (clear)

Buy stock? by kanweg · 2005-09-06 18:02 · Score: 5, Interesting

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

Bert
Sam Kinison once said by ReformedExCon · 2005-09-06 18:08 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
1. Re:Sam Kinison once said by GISGEOLOGYGEEK · 2005-09-06 18:34 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  You are absolutely right.
  
  I mean come on! Look what the IPO did to poor Google!
  
  err.
  
  ya.
  
  --
  George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Re:About Trolltech by rm69990 · 2005-09-06 18:49 · Score: 5, Informative

Actually, QT is a cross platform C++ toolkit. The KDE developers develop their own GUI using QT. It would be the same as saying that GTK is a gui...which makes no sense whatsoever. GTK is a widget set, Gnome is the GUI.
Re:Will their tools stay free? by oever · 2005-09-06 19:56 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:Let's don't get ahead of ourselves by Phosphan · 2005-09-06 20:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

> C++ and Qt C++ is comparable to java and dotnet in terms of bloat and raw speed.
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:
something = SomeAllocFunction(something_specification) someth ingElse = SomeAllocFunction(specification_for_something_else ) result = add_somethings(something, somethingElse) FreeSomething(something) FreeSome thing(somethingElse)
... 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.