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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)
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GNAA's going to foul their drawers over this.
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Kongratulations:)
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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.
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?!
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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.
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.
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I->think(Qt->developers(would_rather_quit(and->tak e->up(knitting)->than(have->to->figure_out(gnome's API)))));