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."

requirements for being public

[Lord Ender]

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.

Re:requirements for being public

[Lord Ender]

99% of what RedHat sells is stuff they DON'T OWN THE COPYRIGHTS TO.

Trolltech owns the rights to QT.

So they are VERY VERY different as far as IP goes.

Probably not good for Trolltech's users

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Now that they're going to IPO

[kimvette]

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.