Interview With Trolltech's CEO and CTO Eirik Eng 266
jlp2097 writes "There is a great and lengthy interview at the The Dot with Eirik Eng, CEO of Trolltech, and Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project and CTO of Trolltech. They talk about the recent X(Free86) trouble, accessibility in QT, Trolltech's finances, Qtopia, the OS X Port and a GPL'd Windows QT - it's probably not going to happen. And, did you know that Qt is pronounced 'Cute' by its creators?"
Bad HTML (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Bad HTML (Score:4, Informative)
"Cute" (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"Cute" (Score:2, Funny)
Re:"Cute" (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"Cute" (Score:4, Funny)
GTK+ (Score:5, Funny)
I also heard that GTK is pronounced "Gittuk" by the gnome hackers...
Re:GTK+ (Score:2, Funny)
cute? (Score:5, Funny)
Another project where the creators don't event know how to pronounce the name of the project? I run into this all the time.
Re:cute? (Score:4, Interesting)
Did you ever consider that the project creators are not from English-speaking countries? Hence, their pronounciation is correct as far as they are concerned.
Qt in Norwegian would sound something like 'ku-teh', or 'cute' to untrained (e.g. non-Norwegian) ears.
Re:cute? (Score:2, Interesting)
Qt became that after the original programmer liked the way Q was rendered under X in emacs. The 't' was for tookit. The 'Q' was because it looked "cute".
I realize (I think?) that the parent of this post was a joke.
Re:cute? (Score:2)
Either this is someone who fails to see the humor in the initial post(which is quite funny i might add), or
morphin3's post is a joke that's not very funny.
This sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
a la Linux [sladen.org]
Canopy/SCO Connection (Score:2, Troll)
PF: Somebody mentioned that the Canopy Group & SCO owns some parts of Trolltech.
ME: Sorry, we don't have any influence on them.
PF: Do they have any influence on you?
ME: Not really. They have a 5.7% stake in Trolltech
This is completely believable -- Trolltech doesn't really fit into Canopy's current legal strategy, and there's unlikely that there's any "influence" going on there.
However, you can be sure that Canopy has access to Trolltech's customer lists -- If y
Canopy Representatives Sit on Trolltech Board. (Score:2, Interesting)
More specific questions remain
The real questions are
1) What is Ralph J. Yarro of Canopy infamy doing on the Trolltech board of directors? Sorry, sitting on the board means "influence".
2) What is financial relationship between SCO/Canopy and Trolltech? Specificly: does Trolltech owe money to SCO/Canopy, does Canopy have contractual rights to seats on the board? Does SCO/Canopy have warrants or other agreements to take control of Trolltech later?
Sadly
Re:Canopy Representatives Sit on Trolltech Board. (Score:2)
Canopy's *Ralph Yarro* sitting on the Trolltech board of directors certainly DOES qualify as influence.
Re:Canopy Representatives Sit on Trolltech Board. (Score:2)
There's a perfectly reasonable explanation. I simply play my Lawful Good paladin when attending Trolltech board meetings, my Chaotic Evil mage when attending SCO board meetings and my True Neutral druid when attending Canopy board meetings. This is quite common practice and nothing to be worried about.
Check your facts, please (Score:2)
Please stop reporting wrong rumours as facts.
Check Trolltech's site for their board of directors [trolltech.com], or search for "Yarro" [trolltech.com] on their site - and then apologies to them for spreading lies.
Re:Canopy Representatives Sit on Trolltech Board. (Score:5, Informative)
What is Ralph J. Yarro of Canopy infamy doing on the Trolltech board of directors?
Early 1999 Trolltech had helped Utah-based Caldera to create their award-winning graphical Linux installer. Around the same time we also started developing Qt/Embedded for the embedded Linux market. Lineo, another Utah company, was the king of embedded Linux at the time, and they needed a product like Qt/Embedded for Linux-based consumer devices.
Canopy was a major VC and stakeholder in both Caldera and Lineo. Ralph Yarro, President and CEO of Canopy, recognized that Trolltech could help two of their porfolio companies succeed and decided to make an investment in Trolltech.
I met Ralph Yarro in Utah in August 1999 and we agreed on an investment term-sheet (with very reasonable terms for Trolltech, by the way).
Did we do the right thing? Definitely. Canopy was the first investor in Trolltech and their investment made it possible for us to grow the company and build new products. Canopy was later followed by Borland and a syndicate of three Norwegian VCs.
As part of the investment agreement, each investor got a seat on the board: Ralph Yarro from Canopy, Dale Fuller from Borland and Ingar Ostby from Northzone. Ralph Yarro has been on our board since late 1999.
Sorry, sitting on the board means "influence".
Ralph Yarro has about zero influence over how we run the company. When you have a person on your board that might have a conflict of interest in certain areas you will make sure that this person does not participate in all discussions or get access to all company information.
What is financial relationship between SCO/Canopy and Trolltech?
The deal in 1999 also involved a stock swap with Caldera. As all of you know, Caldera became SCO a couple of years ago and changed their Linux agenda. Trolltech owned stock in SCO but we decided to sell them last year after the interview took place. But SCO still owns a tiny portion of Trolltech shares.
Does Trolltech owe money to SCO/Canopy?
No.
Does Canopy have contractual rights to seats on the board?
Yes, this is part of the investment contract we have with all our investors.
Does SCO/Canopy have warrants or other agreements to take control of Trolltech later?
No, are you nuts? We would be pretty stupid to sign an investment contract that would give a minor (or even major) shareholder the ability to take control of our company.
Do I support Canopy's or SCO's actions? No way.
Haavard
Re:Canopy Representatives Sit on Trolltech Board. (Score:2)
That's wrong. The KDE developers have an extra vote in case there is a tie.
See the KDE Free Qt Foundation Announcement [kde.org] for more details.
Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows license (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be using Qt/PyQt if it had a non-commercial (or preferably GPL) Windows license, but for now I'm stuck with wxPython - which really isn't as nice as Qt, although sometimes looks better due to native LnF.
I don't see the point of having GPL Linux *and Mac* versions without Windows, just because of the lame excuse "well Windows isn't GPL", it really bugs me, I don't want to write free software that won't work on Windows (and I'm far from a M$ advocate).
MacOSX isn't OSS, it's proprietary Apple stuff that they hacked on top of an OSS OS, so come up with another excuse TT....
And before anyone mentions the non-commercial Qt with the book - that is a very limited version (personal use, non-ditributable), doesn't work with PyQt, and is out-of-date already.
Argh, rant over!
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, yes, it's their code and they can choose to do whatever they want with it. Well, I'll choose to use wxWindows instead...
It just kills me that they justify their GPL'd releases for Linux and
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:5, Informative)
That's _NOT_ the reason they give. The reason they gave is that too many commercial companies used the GPL version of the library in their commercial software instead of using the pricy commercial version of the library, and they said it's impossible to go and sue all of them.
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
I could find no such reference in the section of the interview talking about a GPL'd version for Windows.
The actual reason given was incoherent and completely meaningless. If they had just come right out and said, "we make the vast majority of our money by requirin
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
I find it strange that you wish Qt came with a Windows IDE. I see these as entirely separate products. I do not expect Qt to come with an IDE and indeed would probably not use one (I quite like KDevelop). Qt also does not come with a compiler, it does not come with source code control,
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
Maybe it's just me, but if you pose the question in your FAQ [trolltech.com], but the real answer can only be found by rummaging through a mailing list archive, you're dodging the question.
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
What's wrong with dodging questions?
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
< Ronald Regan Cold War Era Voice > /Ronald Regan Cold War Era Voice >
Mr. Eng,....tear...down.. this... wall!
<
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2, Informative)
I got a copy of Qt with the book "C++ Programming with Qt3" [slashdot.org]
It looks pretty slick. I won't use it at work but everything else is fair game.
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
The non-commercial license is very different from the GPL.
OS X/Darwin (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
To date, I have yet to see any X11 software that used wxWidgets besides one dialog editor for wxWidgets. Maybe its doing gangbusters in Windows land, but it's an unknown in my world.
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2, Flamebait)
I think it's absolutely pathetic the way all these Windows fanboys bitch about the way Trolltech hasn't re
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:3, Informative)
Sort of what the people at kde on cygwin [sourceforge.net] are trying to do with their qt 3 win32 port [sourceforge.net]:
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
This gets a +1: Interesting?! Calling anyone who writes software for 90% of the computer-using public criminals? This may be the most personally insulting thing I've ever read on Slashdot. Ni
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
That's a myth; but one that even the FSF has helped spread [gnu.org] (although not in the exact same form).
However, actually reading the text of the GPL [gnu.org] will reveal that there is no special exception for organizations (or corporations). According to the license, you must apply the GPL whenever you "distribute" the modified software.
Some [walmart.com] organizations [pentagon.gov] have thousands of locations and a million members. To give a modified program to all those people would
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2)
Which is exactly what they did [gnome.org] -- and it's an almighty coincidence if that wasn't what prompted TrollTech to release Qt under the GPL.
Because you are judged by your deeds, not your words. It's bett
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:3, Insightful)
Hacked? Are you an ass? Yes. Yes I believe you are truly an ass!
Hate to pea in your wheaties but Quartz, Cocoa, Java, QuickTime and more are not "hacks." I'd love to see what you consider non-hacks. Let's not even get into the contributions NeXT and now Apple is making with BSD, Mach and GCC. Shit if it wasn't for those contributions GCC would be far behind the curve. It's am
Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
You misunderstand the goal of the GPL (Score:2)
Re:Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
"QT being commercial/GPL is a hinderance to commercial software for Linux."
No it isn't, companies who want to take advantage of Trolltech's work without paying like they normally do on the Win32 platform are the problem. Sorry but your arguement has been debunked about a billion times over. If you can quote one big commercial company who said "The license fee for QT is too expensive so we won't be developing any commercial apps for the Linux" I'll eat my hat.
And Lastly as another wise person once said here, very sorry I don't have your name I just have a bunch of quotse from the last gtk vs qt debate.
" The cost of a license for commercial development is not a valid argument. If a company develops an application for sale, the cost of a license is a fraction of the overall cost to develop, market, and maintain a product. As far as development kits go, the decision on which dev kit that gets chosen is based on quality, which will drive the cost of development in the long run, and company politics."
Re:Linux (Score:2)
Chicken and egg . . . (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Chicken and egg . . . (Score:5, Informative)
The code you write is YOURS. The EULA of the compiler and provided libraries doesn't even TRY to control your licensing scheme.
In fact, the GPL isn't even mentioned in the EULA for MS Visual Studio 6.
The only thing you're prevented from doing is giving away the provided libraries, header files, or source code that come with the compiler and tools.
Don't get me wrong, MSFT sucks big floppy donkey dick, but FUD in either direction helps none of us.
Re:Chicken and egg . . . (Score:2)
Re:Chicken and egg . . . (Score:2)
I think this is the relative paragraph of the GPL that covers this:
In other words, the GPL does not need to apply to the target OS' runtime libraries or developer tools. If it did, then GPL ap
Re:Chicken and egg . . . (Score:2)
> If it did, then GPL applications could only be built with GPL compilers on GPL operating systems.
Either that or a more conventional view of "derived works" would rule the day. The issue is that Stallman seems to be saying "We can use YOUR libraries, but you can't use OURS", and MS is saying "Um Like Whatever, just don't create any obligations for Micro
Re:Chicken and egg . . . (Score:3, Informative)
GCC has been ported to Windows. If you just want a minimalistic setup, try MinGW (Minimalist GNU For Windows) [mingw.org]. This just installs things like GCC and 'make' and a few GCC-related tools. If you want GCC with an entire unix-like environment running
All of my questions have been answer and my (Score:5, Informative)
I feel much relieved now...
Accessibility in KDE (Score:5, Insightful)
If I am not wrong you need to buy seperate s/w for that kind of thing in windows . ( windows users correct me if I am wrong).
Besides adding accessibility features makes KDE very much a candidate for use in Govt. work and any other place where accessibility features are a must.
Re:Accessibility in KDE (Score:2)
And my user name is "frodo from middle ea{rth}", the "rth" was truncated by /. , leading to many people assuming I am from middle ea(st).
And as much as it saddens me to remind you of , your very own history, here goes...You see there was a greate fantasy author called J.R.R Tolkein , from your country. His greatest work a trilogy of books called "The Lord of the rings", was and is immencely popular with geeks, including my
Re:Accessibility in KDE (Score:2)
Re:Accessibility in KDE (Score:2)
GNOME: Views and thoughts from an apps developer (Score:3, Interesting)
Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.
If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.
I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).
Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.
Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.
Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.
Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.
- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,
Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil
Windows Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows Developers (Score:2, Informative)
QT is not preventing you or others from using their tools. You only need to pay for the license.
Re:Windows Developers (Score:2)
So, why are you modded up? I don't know.
Do you understand that even if a GPL software developer paid for the license, he/she could not distribute his GPL'ed program with Qt on Windows? He/she could distribute the binary, obviously. What would be the point of a GPL source that you'd need to compile aga
Re:Windows Developers (Score:2)
Re:Windows Developers (Score:2)
Qt on Windows (Score:4, Informative)
Well, sort of. At the very least, it won't be done with Trolltech's support [iidea.pl].
Scandinavian deathmatch! (Score:2, Funny)
What???? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well it sure as hell will not evolve using QT! This is just a load of monkey muffins. I use
Eclipse
Netbeans
FireFox
Thunderbird
Ope
Perl
Python
DevCpp
GCC
and MySql on my windows box. No free software comunity by butt.
Also worth mentioning.... (Score:2)
Re:What???? (Score:2)
There is no community of Windows developers that are actively developing Free Software for Windows users. You may find a few things (like your list of apps), but they are primarily developed by Unix developers on a Unix system, and not Windows originals.
Re:What???? (Score:2)
What most people still do not seem to get is that the world is application driven and not OS driven. Programs that run under both Windows and Linux do not hurt Linux. My office is going to move to OpenOffice, and T
Re:What???? (Score:2)
Of course, there might be more if Qt had GPL windows version. But I think the biggest problem with it's lack is that it's impossible to port GPL Qt/KDE apps to Windows, and I t
Re:What???? (Score:2)
Hmm, let's query sourceforge.net for GPL projects that target Win32, and see what comes up, shall we? So far, I see:
Sorted by activity, the 100th project on the list has an Activity Percentile of 97.83.
Mr. Eng needs to look in more places than Tucows.
Re:What???? (Score:2)
Then he is still completely wrong. It's not the proportion of open to closed source products on a platform that should be used to measure the strength fo the open source community on that platform, it's the quality of those products. There are plenty of good, well maintained open so
Re:sigh (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't pick surprising pronunciations (Score:2)
Feel free to call it whatever you like, but don't expect your end-users to use a potentially suprising pronunciation. If someone reading your name in print is going to come to a different conclusion, you've probably got a problem. I certainly hear lots of 'Ess-Queue-Ell' instead of Sequel for SQL. There's the ever popular Tex and Latex with the surprising Tech and La-Tech. (And for some reason people get really touchy over that one.) And so Cute is, well, cute, but expect lots of Queue-Tee (or more lik
Re:Don't pick surprising pronunciations (Score:3, Informative)
The correct pronunciation is Ess-Queue-Ell, according to this documentation entry [mysql.com]:
Re:Don't pick surprising pronunciations (Score:2)
On cute (Score:2)
Pronounciation (Score:2, Interesting)
Calling Qt "cute" also makes conversation about it with outsiders obnoxious, as people think I'm using an adjective instead of a noun. It's just easier in all respects to stress both letters (cue tee).
"No! It's Tee-Cee-El" (Score:3, Funny)
I still can't pronounce it "t
Cross-platform OSS is very important! (Score:4, Insightful)
The same could be said for developers. If Qt was a viable option for Windows developers then many would use it and they would be better prepared for, and more likely to switch to, another OS.
This seems like a fairly straight-forward argument, which is why many important OSS projects make a big effort to work on Windows as well as Linux. I realize though, that none of this is within TT's mandate. They are a company, not a project, so their job is to make money. Sometimes this coincides with doing what is best for the OSS and Linux communities, but I am amazed at how often this is not the case.
So, though I am a C++ developer, and I believe that Qt is much better than GTK, I'll have to side with GTK for Linux.
a wacky little society... (Score:2)
Re:Visual Tool (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, I think of this as a strength--if your personal tastes don't lie within QT, you can still use something else. If you don't like VB or VC, then you are stuck with one or two alternatives in Winland.
Re:Visual Tool (Score:2)
Re:Visual Tool (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, TrollTech should continue to serve their customers and develop a great product. Those who are willing to absorb the costs of QT will find themselves with a great product.
Re:Visual Tool (Score:2)
Re:Visual Tool (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Visual Tool (Score:4, Interesting)
You look at windows and Visual Basic and Visual C, those are all anyone would ever need in windows land.
Wrong. There are plenty of non-Microsoft tools available. To name a few open source or OSS-friendly tools: ActivePerl, MinGW, CygWin, Visual-MinGW, GTK+, Eclipse, Java/NetBeans, et al. I use most of those to develop Windows applications rather than Microsoft's offerings. The only thing missing is a good GUI toolkit that is open source (sorry, Java GUIs are fugly), or at least open-source compatible, and Qt fits the bill. Unfortunately, TrollTech refuses to release a free version for Windows because there is no community (bullshit) and trolls like you think Microsoft makes the only decent Windows tools (bullshit).
If projects like OpenOffice and Mozilla can have faith in Windows users and developers, why not TrollTech? TrollTech could help the OSS community make huge strides toward Linux adoption if they would help bridge the gap.
Re:Visual Tool (Score:2)
Investigate wxWidgets [wxwidgets.org].
wxWidgets is a decent toolkit. I do mean to look more closely at it, but Qt is the filet mignon of the GUI toolkit world. wxWidgets was a bit rough around the edges last time I looked at it, but I hear there was a major revision since then. At least the main developer said he had one planned. The last time I looked at it, it was still called wxWindows. That shows my age, eh?
Anyway, free GUI toolkits is one topic that Slashdot covers sometimes. This article is about Qt specificall
Re:Cute (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cute (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cute (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Cute (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cute (Score:2)
Re:Cute (Score:2)
Re:Closed Source Licensing of QT (Score:2, Insightful)
BTW, licence didn't stop Opera from using QT on Linux. I haven't heard about any popular commercial GTK-software...
Re:Closed Source Licensing of QT (Score:2)
Off the top of my head, the "current" commerical GTK apps include Applixware, Gobe Productive, Yahoo Messenger, Sentry BullDog, Netscape, and Eclipse's SWT. The gist of your post is right though, there are more commercial apps using QT than GTK on Linux. However, forget about those two because the current king of commericial GUIs on Linux is (still) boring old Motif!
Re:Closed Source Licensing of QT (Score:3, Informative)
What real reasons are there for QT to change it's licensing for the Windows platform? The interview clearly states why they won't. Your logic makes no sense to me. Someone who embraces the predatory licensing of MS-Windows will be afraid of the licensing of non-Free QT? I doubt it. If someone doesn't like non-Free QT license, but will tolerate MS licensing, then they have some w
Re:You are absolutely correct -- Qt is dangerous (Score:2)
>The use of Qt, for proprietary applications, results in a >platform that is locked in to Trolltech.
So you are saying that freedom in linux means proprietary companies can write proprietary closed source code, and sell it on Linux. That is not about free software. Linux is about free software, which the LGPL disregards.
Which is why Qt is more about free software than GTK will ever be.
Re:GPL Windows Port (Score:2)
Excuse me? It's hard to think of a framework with better docs than qt! In fact, the documentation is really one of it's strong points! It's a real time-saver, with lots of example code, and all methods used in examples are hyperlinked back to their documentation. The only point where I agree is the STL part, but that's partly because it used to be badly supported by compilers (plus it's a pain in the behind to debug).
Re:SwingQT (Score:3, Interesting)
The Qt API is already about as easy to use as Swing anyway, and people can use QtJava if they want to use Qt. But honestly what we needed Sun to do was to increase the number of widgets in AWT rather than developing Swing. Then we could implement more AWT peers using native toolkits and everyone would be happy.
And most importantly, SWT would never have existed.