Trolltech Questions

    Philippe Fremy (Q). We are very curious about Trolltech's business model. Could you detail us your various sources of income: Qt/Embedded, Windows and Unix licenses?

    Eirik Eng (A). We typically generate 50% of our income from Duo Packs -- these are licenses to develop on Windows and Unix. We also generate around 20% of sales from Qt/Embedded, and the rest is from single platform Qt licenses.

    Q. How are things financially with the economy being in the state it is?

    A. Things are fine. We have continued to grow at more or less the rate we had planned. We're more or less on budget, and we're not too worried about making it through the downturn.

    Q. Do you feel you are losing money because of GPL Qt?

    A. We had the same rate of growth before the change in license. In the very early years, we were afraid that if we GPLed Qt, someone with more development muscle would create a hostile fork of Qt and, in a sense, take over our only product. You just don't take any chances with your only bread and butter.

    So, as soon as we felt that we could outrun anyone trying to make a hostile fork, we switched to using the GPL. The switch did not affect our customers, and it had very little practical impact on the Open Source community. But the symbolic effect was astronomical. My inbox was flooded with "thank you" e-mails for quite some time.

    Q. How many employees do you have at the moment, where and how many in each department?

    A. We currently have around 65 employees (I think--I am losing track now). There are 35 in engineering, 4 in product management, 4 in Marketing/Communications, 6 in sales, and the rest in management and administration. We currently have three offices: Our head office in Oslo, Norway; our embedded development center in Brisbane, Australia; and our sales and marketing office in Silicon Valley, California.

    Q. Did the creation of the KDE project change something for you? Do you get any revenue from KDE?

    A. We don't generate income from KDE directly, but KDE has certainly been instrumental in our success. Through KDE, many of our current customers learned about us. Many engineers hack on KDE in the evening, and then go into work in the morning and typically work as a developer. If they like Qt, they ask their boss if they can buy it.

    Q. Do you have any relations with the distribution companies? Does theKompany and Trolltech have contacts with each other? What about the financial issue (does theKompany pay for using Qt?) Does theKompany ask for new features?

    A. We don't have any formal relationships with the desktop/server distribution companies, but we have frequent contact with all the major ones. In the past we have worked with Caldera (created their Lizard installation package for them). And, as you might know, SuSE just published an 1100+ book on Qt in German.

    We do work closely with several key embedded Linux distributors, with partnerships that include reselling Qt/Embedded and Qt Palmtop.

    As for theKompany, we work with them, although we don't have any formal agreements, except on the distribution of BlackAdder.

    Q. How many partnerships do you have? What is their goal (redistributing Qt license under a special condition)? Do they work?

    A. We have several goals when it comes to partnering. With Qt Desktop, our goal is to help it ease into new markets, therefore a partnership in this area would involve the integration of new features, via third parties, to make Qt more attractive to certain markets.

    With Qt/Embedded, we immediately found that in the embedded space, manufacturers wanted reassurances that things will work well together. So we work with embedded Linux distributors and various other suppliers to make the decision of going with Linux as easy as possible.

    Q. Do you have any big deals? We all know about Opera and Kylix, but do you have some big company using Qt massively?

    A. We do have several big deals, many of which we don't publicize. Several large Electronic Design Automation (EDA) companies have standardized on Qt, such as Agilent and Synopsis. We have many customers in the 3D graphics industry, where they use Qt to build design tools to be used by artists. Aerospace, manufacturing, and medical imaging are all industries where Qt is doing quite well. I think one of the coolest is the fact that the European Space Agency is using a Qt-based program for satellite simulations.

    At the recent LinuxWorld in San Francisco, we were told that several companies have started using "Built with Qt technology" as a marketingpoint-without us asking them to!

    Q. What inspired Trolltech to start building Qt, or put another way, what led to the forming of Trolltech? What feature had the toolkit at the beginning?

    A. Haavard Nord, Trolltech's CEO, and I had been working together with various cross-platform GUI tools back in 1991. We were both very disappointed in their quality and were sure we could do it much better. Haavard went on to write his Masters thesis on GUI design, while I wrote a C++ GUI toolkit for a Norwegian company. In 1993 he called me up and suggested that we should join forces and use our experience in GUI design to write the toolkit that would be the king of toolkits. We had no customers, no funding and a lot of enthusiasm. Luckily we were both married to wives who had full-time jobs. We used some savings to rent a small office and hacked away for a year while our wives fed and cared for us. It was a great period, we had the luxury of working undisturbed with something that we were really passionate about. We had seen the pain of traditional GUI programming, and our goal was to make it pleasant to program GUIs. I think we have succeeded in that.

    The features that Qt 1.0 came with were pretty limited. E.g we did not have a multiline text widget! We recently hired the guy who bought the first Qt licenses--he occasionally jokes that one of our big selling features was that Qt could rotate text.

    Q. Just curious, how did your company arrive at the name "Trolltech"? Do you mind the resulting nickname of "the trolls" at all?

    A. Haavard and I were thinking about what to call the company for a while. One night, Haavard had a dream where the company was called "Trolltech". In the dream his wife hated the name, so he asked her what she thought when he woke up. She liked it. The rest is history.

    As to being referred to as "Trolls", we don't mind. Trolls are something very Scandinavian, and in a way provides a title for all of us to share. It's kind of a bonding thing.

    Q. Who owns Trolltech AS?

    A. We do. That is to say, the employees own 70% of Trolltech. We have created a charitable foundation that owns 5% of the company. We have also received some investments from Borland, The Canopy Group (Lineo, Caldera, etc), Northzone Ventures, Teknoinvest, and Orkla.

    Q. Is Trolltech planning to go public, with their stock, anytime soon?

    A. While we don't have a specific timeline, going public is certainly an objective of Trolltech.

    Q. How does one go about getting a job at TT? What are the qualifications that you desire for programmers and do they need degrees in computer science/engineering? Do you hire based on reviewing contributions to KDE?

    A. We hire based on one thing--how well you can code. We briefly skim a CV, and then dig deep into the code to see what the applicant can do. If we like what we see, we usually fly the applicant in to Oslo so that they can meet the rest of the team.

    We only hire the best, and I mean the best. Our engineers do brilliant things. I am constantly amazed at what they do, and I like to consider myself to be a pretty good hacker (at least I used to be, before my hair got too pointy).

    When it comes to hiring non-technical people, we usually make them do a test. When we hire PR people, for instance, we tell them about an upcoming press release we have in the works, and then make them write it. The hiring process is a rigorous one.

Technical questions

    Q. What makes Qt so good?

    A. Three things:

• An excellent team of engineers;
• A solid base with which to work from (we could have pushed Qt 1.0 out in a quarter of the time, but we took our time to build a base that we could continue to expand); and
• Snapshot releases every 24 hours coupled with a committed and enthusiastic user base that gives us constant feedback.

    Q. What OS/distro/desktop do the Qt developers use?

    A. There are a variety of environments in the office. The developers typically use Linux, although several use Windows. There are several different Linux distros kicking around the office, but only one desktop--KDE.

    Q. There are many Qt advocates here, but, when pushing it in our companies, we are often confronted with Java, MFC. Do you have any very sensible argument to help us convince management to use Qt instead of any other toolkit? Do you have also sensible arguments for Gtk?

    A. We do have several arguments for each.

• Java: Given the nature of Java, it can't run natively on any given platform. There are speed and memory issues associated with Java that Qt does not have.
• MFC: Two main advantages. Qt is cross-platform, and, given our customers/users feedback, much more intuitive and easy to code with.
• Gtk: Although Gtk is on Windows as well as X, Qt has a far better cross platform implementation. Qt is written in C++, instead of C, has a company standing behind it, and needs much less code to write the same app.

    Q. What is Trolltech's position on the full C++ standard? E.g., do you advocate the use of all aspects of the STL, and if so, are future versions of QT going to be based around the STL?

    A. There are still some compiler and memory usage issues with STL. Many of our users use STL together with Qt without any problems, there really aren't that many parts of the Qt API that require conversions to be done.

    Q. Further to this, are there plans to get the signal/slot mechanism of moc into the C++ standard, or do you feel a preprocessor is a fully satisfactory solution?

    A. We are not working actively to make this happen, although one of our developers has talked to Bjarne Stroustrup about this possibility.

    Q. Displays are getting bigger, and screen elements are getting lost - e.g., icons must now be produced in multiple sizes. People also want to use things on smaller screens - e.g., the ipaq. Are there any plans to make Qt pixel independent, like Fresco or Berlin?

    A. No, we currently do not have plans for this.

    Q. When Qt comes to Mac will Linux and Windows users be able to use the Aqua theme?

    A. No, they will not be able to. Apple is very protective of the Aqua design, so we will not be implementing it on other platforms. Apple has offered their help to promote Qt/Mac, and we don't feel that going against their wishes will help them or us.

    Q. What will be in Qt4?

    A. We don't know yet. We have a few really cool things we're working on right now, but we don't know if they are going into later versions of the 3.x series, or if we'll wait until 4.0. You will have to just wait and see.

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