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Trolltech Going Public
An anonymous reader writes "After 12 years in business, Trolltech, the company whose founders created KDE, has filed an application for listing on the Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE). From the article: 'The OSE reports receiving the application the following day, and says Trolltech is now subject to disclosure of information requirements. IPO rumors sprang up around Trolltech last Fall, when the company hired Juha Christensen and Tod Nielsen in September, and then added Benoit Schillings and Dr. Karsten Homann in October. The company said in January that it doubled its design wins, among other significant 2005 achievements', particularly in the arena of using Linux as OS to power mobile phones."
(-1, Trolltech)
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
GNAA's going to foul their drawers over this.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Kongratulations:)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
an article about trolltech but nothing about today's vonage ipo?
Never knew that...
Let's do the QT4 Dance to celebrate!
Will that make QT opened finally?
Will it always be in the stock holders' best financial interest that new versions of QT for linux be licensed under the GPL? If not, they will be obligated to change licenses to something less free.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
"the company whose founders created KDE"
That's incorrect, the founders of Trolltech are not KDE coders, although the founder of KDE was hired by Trolltech and now heads Qt development.
There's a few of us who are fans....
Trolltech did not found the KDE project; Matthias Ettrich created KDE. Trolltech just created QT, the widget toolkit library used by KDE. God, don't the Slashdot editors know anything?!
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Why is it that this doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling in the same that QObject(parent) does, yet I'm strangely compelled to take part in the public offering?
-P
Does anyone know if we will be able to buy Trolltech stock here in the US through the normal firms we use? :)
Schwab in particular
I guess that movies explains the diff. Ppl want to join in on the OSS approach, whereas only those with other interest join in on this dance. Shoots; he even had to get after others to not sit down.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
are the employees dancing with joy again ?
This is the official notification from http://ose.no/ (Oslo Stock Exchange) http://www.newsweb.no/index.asp?symbol=TROLL&meldi ng_ID=129065 .
:)
Nice ticker symbol if anything
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses
You can't even make a prototype of a program with out paying TT - they require you to destroy all code and start from scratch. No code developed using the free version may be used in a for profit project.
" * Build commercial software and software whose source code you wish to keep private.
* Freely choose licensing for the software you are writing (Proprietary, Open Source or both).
* Get commercial support from Trolltech
* Be able to gain access to Qt Solutions and commercial-only Qt components such as commercial database drivers and the Visual Studio Integration on Windows.
You must purchase a Qt Commercial License from Trolltech or from any of its authorized resellers before you start developing proprietary software. The Commercial license does not allow the incorporation of code developed with the Open Source Edition of Qt into a proprietary product.
For desktop applications, there are no royalties, runtime licenses, or other additional costs.
The license is sold on a per-developer basis and assigned to an individual. It may be transferred, but only every six months and within the same organization. To transfer a license, or if you need a more flexible licensing agreement, please contact sales@trolltech.com.
"
One common question about Open Source development is "How will programmers get paid?"
It has become quite apparent that software developers working in Open Source definitely want to get paid, they'd just rather do it via IPO and devil take the hindmost.
Unfortunately, IPOs rarely prove to be advantageous to the customers of the company in question. If I were making decisions about a cross-platform toolkit to use for development, Qt would just have gone way down the list. It's all very well having the source, but it's still much better if the guys who really know it inside out are doing the maintenance, and some of that maintenance may not be in the future shareholders' interests.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They have a dual license system which is the perfect answer for those who say no one can profit under the GPL. You can get Qt under the GPL and then, of course, what you do with it continues under GPL. But if you want to implement something using Qt and sell it without the GPL, you can buy Qt from Trolltech under a different license.
If they should stop releasing Qt under the GPL they would have to consider market forces. Gnome is out there and in direct competition with Qt through Kde. By changing the Qt license now they would practically throw away any chance they have to profit in the whole Linux desktop market in the future.
DAZ Studio is one of many examples of commercial software that use Qt. It is also free as in free beer.
They can be reached through this website. Need I say more?
Does this mean they are going to try to be more aggressive in trying to gain market share? The last time I checked Qt licensing the price was outrageous for each seat. Compared to developing apps using Qt, it is much, much cheaper to subscribe to MSDN and gain access to about $50K worth of development tools for around $2K, and if worried about cross-platform interoperability look at Crossover Office or .wine as either porting or runtime solutions.
The pricing for proprietary use of Qt is unreasonable (compare to other class libraries, especially in the Windows world. Even Stingray with its slew of libraries is MUCH cheaper) and until Trolltech brings their licensing costs down to more reasonable levels, you're going to see proprietary developers continue to use harder-to-code-for-but-up-front-startup-cost friendlier Gtk for proprietary applications, despite STUPID dumbed-down user-unfriendly dialogs like the GtK file dialog that nearly everybody hates.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
[To keep the software free,] get ready to dole out all your personal information in the [difficult] registeration process--compared to today.
Wow, that is about the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
It's PubliK.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
so why not the company? :)
How does one buy shares ?
Pupeno
Anyone know how non-Norwegians can participate in the IPO?
[root@localhost ~]# nslookup kde.org
Server: xxx.xxx.1.1
Address: xxx.xxx.1.1#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: kde.org
Address: 62.70.27.118
[root@localhost ~]# nslookup trolltech.com
Server: xxx.xxx.1.1
Address: xxx.xxx.1.1#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: trolltech.com
Address: 62.70.27.70
62.70.* is trolltech land
"Thankfully, we were able to get Trolltech to discount their SDK fee considerably since the package that we're offering is limited for use specifically with DAZ|Studio. We do not offer the complete QT package, if you're interested in that so that you can use it to develop items for other apps, then you'll need to contact Trolltech directly. It's been a very useful tool for our development team and we wouldn't have this cool cross-platform application if it wasn't for their tools.
"Through this special pricing, DAZ is able to distribute copies of the DAZ|Studio SDK for a one time fee of $995. This does not include any general QT support from Trolltech, as far as we're aware. It does include some DAZ support, and we'll be heading that up through a special forum private to registered developers. The current "Developer Discussion" forum is for everything pertaining to the free DAZ|Script dev kit only and will remain open to the public.
"DAZ is also going to be offering a further discount as an incentive to publish plugins through the DAZ3D website. If you choose to release your plugins/add-ons exclusively through the DAZ3D website (you may also sell through your own personally owned site, if you have one), then DAZ will subsidize the full amount of the Trolltech license fee. Unfortunately, we must require the $995 up front from everyone in order to make sure that Trolltech's fee is covered by each copy we distribute. The way that DAZ will subsidize the cost is that the first $995 dollars of commissions that DAZ collects as our portion of your products revenues will be given back to you. In other words, in a standard 50/50 royalty split with DAZ, once your product nets $1990, then the cost of the license fee will be given back to you.
"As part of this exclusivity contract that you will need to agree to, there will be an early termination clause. If you agree to these terms, but then pull your product(s) from the DAZ site before one year has transpired from the purchase date of your license from DAZ, then DAZ will need to reclaim the $995 from you. Unfortunately, if you only wish to release freebies, Trolltech still requires us to collect their license fee 100%. :(
"Hopefully, through this subsidization program, as many of you as possible will be able to obtain the full DAZ|Studio SDK so that you may release whatever products you wish.
"Here is more technical information regarding the SDK and what is included:
"All the sample plugins that that come with the DAZ|Studio SDK include project files for compiling in Microsoft Visual C++ 7 (.NET). Microsoft Visual C++ 6 can also be used to compile plugins for DAZ|Studio. However, no project files are included in the SDK for VC++ 6 or earlier, or any other IDE (due to the large number of them in use by the developer community at large). Other Development Environments may also work for compiling DAZ|Studio plugins, however, other IDEs are not officially supported by DAZ for the Win32 environment, so you will likely need to adjust the way your particular compiler finds/names symbols in order to link against the DAZ|Studio libraries. Some people have had success using Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition, which is freely available from Microsoft.
"On the Mac, the IDE that we use is XCode, using the GCC 3.3 compiler. XCode is freely available from Apple.
"So, we hope that the free DAZ|Script dev kit will be robust enough for those you who do not have the budget for the full SDK license, and that through our "subsidy", that those of you who are interested in becoming serious plugin developers will be able to do so with little financial impact as well.
"Thanks for your support, we can't wait to see what sorts of tools and features you all begin to add to DAZ|Studio as third-party developers. Together, we can all help make DAZ|Studio into the program of our dreams. :)
"Enjoy the new version, and have a great weekend."
Can you imagine what would happen if they decided to release the code under a more restrictive license? The project would be forked quicker than you could say "fork it!" ... and then no one would be using their product. Bad idea. Even Microsoft knows that people using your product but not paying for it is better than no one using your product at all.
and goodbye Qt. As we know it anyway.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there's very little hope that this clause could ever be enforced. However, if you do write software, compile it with the GPL version, and it ever got leaked out.. it could cause some grief.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
TrollTech's behavior for mobile devices has been exclusionary: using Qt/Embedded ensures that other toolkits cannot run on the same device in any meaningful way.
This would be excusable if at least their claims were true that their embedded toolkits are faster than running an X11 server with an X11 toolkit, but, sadly, the reverse is true: not only are you locked into their software, Qt/Embedded is also slow and resource intensive compared to a good X11-based implementation.
Trolltech has exactly nothing to do with the Appeal project. Out of more than a dozen people involved there is just one guy whose work gets sponsored by Trolltech.
Isnt this the current CEO of Borland
As a matter of fact wasnt this the chap who decided to discontinue Borland's IDE business ? Wonder what he's upto with his finger in the Trolltech pie.
That clause pre-dates the existance of GPL QT.