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."

Comments

Founders

[JRiddell]

"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.

Re:requirements for being public

[stilborne]

if that were to happen, the Free Qt Foundation's agreement with Trolltech will kick in and Qt will be released under the BSD. that's a worst case and rather unlikely scenario, however.

it assumes that having Qt under the GPL is a bad thing for Trolltech. i really have to wonder how well known and popular Qt would be today if it hadn't been released as permissively as it have.

there have also been a -lot- of benefits to Trolltech with having Qt GPL'd including having a full desktop platform on UNIX and Linux that "Qt-friendly", the immense amount of testing and real-world feedback they get via the usage of the GPL versions, etc.

there are a lot of companies out there, several of whom are also public, that have released their primary software assets under a Free software license such as the GPL. so there's precedence for this in any case.

As usual, the summary is incorrect.

[Slithe]

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?!

NYSE?

[SmileeTiger]

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 :)

Re:NYSE?

[paulthomas]

For that to work you need a bank to issue American Depository Receipts for the stock. The bank (Bank of New York most commonly) buys a certain number of shares and then issues shares on the OTC market in the US representing the underlying foreign shares.

For example, if you want to own 0992.hk (Lenovo), you can not easily do so directly in a US brokerage account. However, you can own the American Depository shares which represent 20 underlying shares on the Hong Kong market. These depository shares trade on the Over the Counter market (quoted on the pink sheets) as LNVGY (.pk for pinksheets).

Some sponsored ADRs actually trade on established exchanges like the NYSE. For example, Sony has American Depository shares which represent their common stock trading on the NYSE as SNE. Hitachi does the same thing as HIT.

Whether you can buy a foreign issue (or an ADR representing the foreign issue) in a local brokerage account depends mostly on whether the company has taken steps to create an ADR or whether there is enough interest to create an underwriting profit for a bank to create an ADR.

There is no indication that an ADR (trading either on the OTC market or on the NYSE or other established exchange) will be created for the Trolltech common stock. If it is not, your only option is to use a brokerage which lets you directly buy and hold foreign stocks on foreign exchanges. Such an account is usually considerably more expensive than your typical discount brokerage account.

Re:NYSE?

[paulthomas]

I at least make an effort to define them (even if not in the most appropriate place).

For the record:

• OTC: Over The Counter. A market for stocks and other securities that do not trade on formal exchanges
• NYSE: New York Stock Exchange
• ADR: American Depository Receipt
• LNVGY, SNE, HIT: Stock symbols for ADRs (see above)
• US: United States (of America)

End of Transmission

The official OSE notification

[jmoen]

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 :)

Will the be as honest as they currently are?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

"

Re:requirements for being public

[Arandir]

Nonsense. Trolltech cannot make Qt less free, according to a legal guarantee they made with KDE. http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p hp

Special deal with TrollTech

[Un pobre guey]

Not exactly. Here is something they posted on a DAZ Studio forum:

"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."