Interview: Trolltech's Eirik Eng and Matthias Ettrich

Eirik Eng, president of Trolltech, and Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project and director of software development at Trolltech, were interviewed by Philippe Fremy, KDE enthusiast. This interview was conducted in August 2003. The interview was made possible by Laurent Rathle, who is maintaining the KDE France website. A French translation is available on KDE-France.

Before entering the interview itself, I would like to thank heartily all the people who have given their time to transcript the 90 minutes of interview into text and edit the result: Dave Brondsema, Navindra Umanee, Nicolas Verite, Stephan Binner, Laurent Rathle, Pascal Audoux, Sylvain, Fabrice Mous and Ingo Klöcker.

An important note to all the readers, Qt is pronounced 'Cute' by its creators.

Philippe Fremy: I don't know if you remember, but this is not the first interview I have done with Trolltech. I did one by email two years ago.

Eirik Eng: I remember that. Quite a lot has happened in two years.

PF: I guess you know that I have been asking around the community for questions to ask Trolltech.

EE: Yes, we saw the article on dot.kde.org, that was a good idea.

PF: What is the state of your business today: How many licenses are you selling, what are the main sources of profit, the type of clients?

EE: Today, Trolltech has 76 employees. We have one office here in Oslo where we are around 50 employees, we have one embedded office department in Australia (in Brisbane) and we have sales and marketing offices in the United States, each with about 12 employees.

Financially, Trolltech is now about break-even, capital-wise. We had a period of two years where we were losing money. Specifically due to growing the organization by using the investments that were received in 2000. Right now, we are at the point of break-even, but we see that our income is growing faster than our expenses. So things are looking very good for the future.

In terms of customers and licenses, we now have well over 2000 customers and a typical Trolltech Qt customer is either a large company that has its own software development department or a small company that specializes in software development. That's the two typical types of customers we have today.

We have about 80% coming from the desktop business and development tool business, and 20% coming from Qtopia and Qt/Embedded.

PF: In which countries has Qt had more success or less success?

EE: In terms of sales, we have about half of our license sales in the USA and a clear second is Germany, with about 20%. France and United Kingdom are competing for third place with 5%. I think Japan is getting pretty close to France and UK.

We have sold to 65 countries so far. It is really a very distributed market and everything is over the net, of course.

PF: Now, a question that everybody has been asking: Why isn't there a GPL version of Qt3 for Windows?

EE (laughing): As some people mentioned on the dot, it has partly to do with finances, sales and Trolltech's business model. Another point is the fact that Windows is a closed source Operating System. There is no community for Free Software development under Windows. The situation is very different from Linux, as you know. On Windows development usually happens as shareware or commercial software and we don't see that community evolving into producing Free Software.

PF: So basically, you think you would not leverage a similar effect as you did with Qt on Linux?

EE: Not at all. And we have considered the risks for us as a company. Still today, a big part of the contacts we have with customers are the people registering for the evaluation version for Windows. They have to give us a name, an email address and tell us a little bit about their project. Then we give them an evaluation version for Windows. This is how we get in contact with the customers, how we can find out information about their project or what they need and help them understand the licensing model. So, that's part of what we risk losing.

As you know we are doing an experiment these days with the Macintosh port. We have seen that there is a very good evolution in the Macintosh community. There is a lot of Free Software development going on and we thought this was the right time to GPL the Mac OS version, to make sure that the Free Software community for Mac OS X has a great tool.

PF: About Qt on Mac OS, the very first announcement on the website mentioned Qt running on Mac OS 9. It was quickly removed, something like one day after. Did Qt really run on Mac OS 9 or is it just limited to Mac OS X?

Matthias Ettrich: We had a prototype on Mac OS 9 and some applications were running, but it was far from production quality. And we figured out that there were many limitations in order to complete our work. Mac OS 9 had too many limitations. At that time, Apple was clearly saying that they were moving to X, that 9 was going to fade out. That's why we started a totally new port, to Mac OS X.

PF: Eugenia Loli-Queru (from OSNews) has been complaining in an article than on Mac OS, Qt applications are not perfectly like the Aqua applications. The complaint is that Qt is actually emulating the first version of the Aqua style, and Apple has since then slightly changed the style. So you are not using native Mac OS X API, unlike the Windows XP version of Qt. Is that correct?

EE: Yes and No. The very first version of Qt for Macintosh, the 3.1 version was emulating the style. It was the first Aqua style and it has changed a bit.

The current version (3.2), and the one in GPL, is actually using Apple's style API to draw widgets. That means that we follow whatever changes Apple does to the style and that Qt stays up-to-date.

So there is no reason to complain about that anymore.

PF: Have you had any commercial relationship with Apple when you were working on Mac OS? Do you plan any future partnership?

EE: We don't have a formal commercial arrangement as such but we have very good contacts with Apple and we speak to them regularly, on several levels. They think this is a very good thing. For the time being we decided to cooperate just informally, like what we are doing. We are getting a lot of support in return, most notably at the Worldwide Developer Conference. Central people at Apple have been presenting and talking about Qt as a very good development solution for the Macintosh.

PF: Right now Qt supports accessibility on Windows and you probably know that in the US there is a law which states that if want to sell software to the government you have to enable accessibility in your applications. What is Trolltech going to do about this?

As you know GNOME has a very strong support for accessibility thanks to the work of Sun, Gtk+ provides simple bindings to accessibility devices. Qt in this regard is quite behind. And there is work going in KDE in this field too. So I would like to know what do you plan to do?

EE: We're working on it, there has been a lot of things going on in Qt development lately. This is something we are actively working on.

I spoke with the developer who has started working on the accessibility module of Qt. This is definitely something that is needed, but it has not been on the top of the list for many of our customers. This is why it took us so long to start this project.

ME: There some problems when doing accessibility on Linux right now. First of all, the market is not yet demanding. I mean, there is no customer saying "This is something that we absolutely require right now". Another problem is the work done by Sun: the ATK on Linux. The trouble is that an accessibility framework for a toolkit is not useful if you don't have the integration and a tool to actually test the development. This is a bit of the chicken and egg problem. It doesn't make sense to develop applications if you don't have the controlling tool to actually use these things.

In order to implement accessibility in a toolkit you need another middleware infrastructure that can bind that in. That means accessibility require that your applications can actually talk to each other. You need an IPC system. This is all built into windows but a standard is lacking on Linux.

So the first thing that we need to have is an IPC protocol. I think GNOME is using CORBA for that, so we would have to integrate that first before we could use the accessibility protocol. It's not that easy, it's an infrastructure, you can't just sit down with a developer for a couple of weeks and then you have it. It is actually much more work.

But there is work going on in the KDE community and I hope that we in Trolltech will be able to provide resources in the near future to solve this problem. Because it is not enough if we [Trolltech] do something, it's important that the Free Software applications support it too.

PF: You said that the business is not ready to receive it, that there is no business demand. Maybe if you start to propose, the business will move toward accessibility. Then you could be proposing instead of just waiting for people to ask.

ME: Sure, but this is a game, this is an investment. Trolltech is, like Eirik told you before, cash-flow positive. The investment can push developments. If we had had enough resources, I would have worked on that five years ago.

PF: What do you think of the Opie project and its relationship with Qtopia. Is it a competitor? Are you thinking about reintegrating some advances of Opie back into Qtopia?

EE: We think it's a very good thing that there is Free Software project now, working on PIM application suite. We have very good contact with the group. From what I understand, we already have integrated patches from the Opie project into Qtopia. We are working together with them to make sure that we have binary compatibility on the infrastructure.

It is again limited how much a company can do. This where the Open Source model is excellent, as long as there are enthusiasts out there, willing to work on it and making it better.

We don't see competition since this is a Free Software project using Free Software licenses. Our business model is based on cooperating with Free Software projects, making sure that people who use our software for Free Software can use is for free. Our customers, however want commercial licenses. They pay it for development and for the support. We think that this is a very good model and it is working very well.

PF: Qtopia is based on Qt 2. Is it expected to move Qt 3? And if it does move will you keep the binary compatibility so that legacy applications can still run?

EE: Complicated question.

Of course one possibility, that Matthias is mentioning to me here, is isolation of two libraries for a true binary compatibility in the future. So it is possible, but it is not a very good solution because it uses a lot of memory.

One of the historical reason to keep Qt 2 for Qtopia is that many of our customers are very focused on stability and as you mentioned binary compatibility.

Qtopia will more than probably integrate into the current version of Qt in the future. But we have to do it in a sort of one big step for our customers. It would probably be provided as a binary compatibility option as Matthias mentioned. But our main focus is on keeping most of the source compatibility, so there we will be more or less a simple recompile to make these applications work on all platforms. I think it has to be one big chunk of operation, when we move to new level and break the binary compatibility.

PF: Some people complained that some parts of Qtopia are not available under a free license, for example, the desktop. It doesn't really make any sense, why not release the desktop under a free license so we can use it, even on more platforms like Mac OS?

EE: It has to do with historical reasons and it has also has to do with the business-model. We do that to make sure that there is one component there that customers need and so they come in contact with us. There are other parts of Qtopia that are not completely free, for example: parts of the e-mail reader as far as I remember. It is always a fine balance for Trolltech and I think in this case it turns out to be a good solution. But I do see the problem there with the Qtopia-desktop.

PF: Was Zaurus a success? Did it sell well? Do you think there is there really a future with Linux on the PDA?

EE: Yes, I think definitely there is a big future for Linux on the PDA? Did it sell well? We are not allowed to go out with Sharp's numbers unfortunately. I think it is selling well in some markets. It was a very good first-time project. It was the first large conceiver brand that embraced Linux in this way and I think we are going to see Sharp coming up with new generations, which are going to become better and better. I know that in the enterprise market they are doing very well. So in general: Yes, it has been a success. It has been a very very important direction for Trolltech, for the Qtopia-product and make Qtopia known in a lot more circles.

PF: Recently there was an announce about a big electronic consortium being formed to use Linux on embedded equipments. Does Trolltech have plans to contact them and do something with them?

EE: We are in contact with them right now to see how we can cooperate. We think it is very exciting that so many large companies are backing Linux on portable devices this way.

PF: There are many many free software projects trying to use Qt in different languages with Python, Ruby, Java, C#, Ada. Some bindings are missing, some are half-done, some are done very professionally. Are you supporting this kind of development? I mean, are you just watching them or sometimes would you be interested in supporting the people doing this in order to have a wider possibility for the usage of Qt?

ME: We have had contacts with some of the authors of bindings, so we support them on request and have contact and talk to them. We keep that option open to do more things with bindings in the future. Our current stand is that there is very little commercial interest in those bindings. There are also surprisingly little Free Software using them. There are very few applications being written with those bindings.

Qt as API shines most with C++. Together with C++ the overall value of Qt is much bigger than when you do, for example, use Python-bindings. One of the reasons for that is that Python - but you could pick Perl or any other language - have a large set of libraries and additional tools.

Python has stuff to do network, server programming, to do I/O, XML. If you put Qt on top of that, you are only interested in the GUI, whereas the C++ people will use the XML API, the file abstraction and all the things so the value is much higher.

PF: The PyQt/BlackAdder license is so cheap in comparison with the full Qt license. How can you make money out of this ?

EE: It is a very limited market as Matthias has mentioned. And it is also seen as a commercial experiment to see how much interest there is in it. And we have been marketing together with TheKompany on it. The question is good and so far, at least from our side, it has been disappointing how few companies actually have an interest in developing using such a tool . I guess that comes back to, as Matthias said, Qt is really a C++ toolkit and that's where it shines and really add value.

PF: If you look back at everything you have achieved with Trolltech, what would you like to underline, what are the things you are proud of, or the things you really regret that happened, the mistakes you made?

EE: First one is really easy to answer, what's makes me personally most proud is the fact that we have made life a lot easier for a lot of people who are developers out there. When I started looking at multi-platform GUI toolkit together with Harvard back in 1990, we saw that the API was terrible and that they were so difficult to use. You had to spend a lot of time reading the documentation to find how to use the tools, and we decided that it could be a lot better. You could make an API that really is logical and easy to use and you could make the application developers concentrate on the creative part of the work and actually making their application logic, not using the toolkit. In many ways, we have achieved that. I still get a thrill out of the feedback customers saying "Wow, this is fantastic, you've really given my the fun back in doing the job". And that's what I am the most proud of. I mean, commercialize the toolkit that makes daily works of programmers much better.

PF: And on the things you regret and wish did not happened?

EE (laughing): That's easy to answer too. I let Matthias answer.

ME: It's an open secret that the full opening of Qt came to late. We should have done that earlier.

At the time where we were doing the first free version of Qt, there were people saying that GPL means you can do everything with it. So people don't know much about free software licenses in the market. So I don't know what would have happened. I don't know what would have happened if we had GPL Qt in 1995. Maybe Trolltech would not exist today. You never know. But I personally do regret that we could not do it earlier.

EE: Yeah, I agree. But also, part of the discussion at the time was that if you go there, you can possibly come back on the decision. We saw that once we were going GPL, there were no going back. There was a lot of internal discussions about the risks. For example, a company could start a fork, for example Red Hat, and we would lose control about what was the only bread and butter of the company. But as Matthias said, once we did it, it was amazing to see the effect that we got so much positive PR, and good will in the community. In practice, nothing changed. We still have the control, people respected that Trolltech had the latest official version and things continued as they were previously. It was the right choice but, yes, we could have done it earlier.

PF: Do you plan to extend your business in the future to something other than strictly selling a library? How about selling books, packaged software, trainings ?

EE: We are already selling solutions to hardware developers of portable devices: Qtopia. This is actually quite a different type of business, although technically it's the same basis.

We also do sell training classes, although we outsource most of the practicality of it. But as a company, right now we are trying to focus on things we're good at. Who knows what's going to happen in the future? We have so many exciting possibilities within the basis we are operating in already, development tools and platforms for mobile devices. We almost have the opposite problem internally. We have to choose the best options going forward and not spread too much into too many things. It's really important to focus on our core knowledge.

PF: Do you plan one day to make Qt Designer a full IDE? Do you plan to separate it into different modules so it could be integrated separately in other projects, like KDevelop or Kommander ?

ME:
To question one: no, but one should never say never.

The second question is a much more likely option and yes we do have concrete plans. I can not promise a release date however. KDevelop has developed into an excellent IDE. I think it's really amazing what the guys have achieved. This thing is in many ways the period to what you get today on Microsoft Windows from Visual Studio. What the problem is with KDevelop right now is that the GUI builder, which is Qt Designer is not available as an integrated plugin. Today we can not offer that because the way Qt Designer is written makes it very hard to take the form editor out and integrate that into an external tool like KDevelop. We will work on making this either possible through plugins or through libraries. That will take many more months before that is finished. But this is one of the goals we have to cooperate with the KDevelop team.

PF: As you know probably, IBM has released Eclipse and the SWT, an IDE and a GUI toolkit for Java built (unlike Swing) upon native toolkits. It currently uses Gtk+. Is it planned to provide it for Qt? There is a license incompatibility, which is hard to deal with but achieving that would be very exciting.

EE: We are in contact with IBM and have been for some time over this. And as you mentioned, it's basically a licensing issue. Our business model is based on the fact that developers who want to use Qt to make closed source software, have to purchase the license from Trolltech. It is very important for us to maintain that model; that's how we survive as a company. And we're having problems finding a licensing solution for Eclipse to make this possible for us in the future. So we're still talking to them, but it's difficult for me to see how we can find a licensing solution, unfortunately. But I agree with you, it would be great if we could make this happen.

PF: Have you encounter any competition with Gtk, in the commercial software field. Are you aware of a situation where you have lost customers to Gtk or people just told you "we prefer Gtk and won't use Qt at all"?

EE: The short answer is no.

PF: And in the opposite case?

ME:I think that even if you don't believe it, it is true, actually true.

EE: Basically, the company we are in contact with, want a C++ solution, because Qt is only available on C++ . If you make a comparison between Gtk+ and Qt, for C++, Qt wins every time. We haven't seen any company that chose Gtk+ over Qt. When we are talking about C as a it's a different story, because you have the opportunity to use Gtk with C and you cannot use Qt with C. I would suspect that a society looking for a C solution would probably would go with Gtk, but I've never heard about them.

PF: You were talking about Red Hat and you were afraid about Red Hat forking Qt and making business of it.

EE: In fact, in stone ages, that' right.

PF: Have you been in competition with them regarding GUI development: they have a strong position in Linux and they are pushing GTK. Have you been facing them commercially in this area?

EE: No, actually we have not. Not, that I know.

PF: And have you tried to approach them and try to convert them to Qt instead of GTK ?

EE: Not really. We have been in contact with them several times through the fact they have chosen GTK for a lot of their projects. Again for C++ Qt is superior and I believe for any C++ project out there people would choose Qt. In the end, no, we're actually working on it.

PF: What do you do to make Qt adopted everywhere? Are you active about talking to companies that are already using GTK and converting them to Qt? For example MandrakeSoft that is using GTK for all his configuration tools, Macromedia for his RealPlayer, no it's not RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader which is using Motif, and things like that...

EE: From time to time we are in contact with those companies explaining them the advantages of QT but I think we bumped into licenses issue or language issue. We're working in this base.

PF: Are you aware of companies that are writing really new consumer products converting their currents ones to Qt, except for the one you have been advertising on your website?

EE: Nothing we can talk about right now. Most of our customers would like to keep their project secret until they're ready with the final version. So, they're nothing that we can talk about right now.

PF: I read a few articles on the net, saying that basically all the movies visual effects companies are moving onto Linux. You are advertising one on your website, which is moving to Qt. Have you seen big move to Qt in this area ?

EE: Yes, we are seeing a big move in this area. And it is basically to move on some customers in this base. Others have been interested because of that. We are seeing a lot of those companies moving to Qt right now.

Actually, the market where we see most movement right now is this one and next is EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software tools that layout chip design. We see a lot of companies that are also moving to Qt.

PF: So that's very specialized high market. For very dedicated and very expensive tool.

EE: yes

PF: Regarding the availability of Qt 3 for Windows, have you think of a solution to the problem that people cannot build free software on windows with Qt. They really regret that. Would it be possible to have something like a way to submit a project to Trolltech and receive the project back built on windows so that they wouldn't break the license. They wouldn't use a free version of Qt but they would be able to provide their software on windows.

ME: The problem is not so much our licensing, we wouldn't have a problem with that at Trolltech but the problem is typically the Free Software licenses. You cannot take a GPL Linux program, compile them with Qt for windows and give the executable to somebody else, because you would violate the GPL. [Ed: because Qt on windows is closed source]

So this is the biggest concern. We could even do a non-commercial version for windows like we did with version 2 but the trouble is that, because Qt is GPL you cannot use this version to port Free Software to windows, so the only option they really have is likewise, that would be a GPL windows version and Eirik talked about that earlier.

PF: It's just about putting an exception in the license of the software, I think many people would be ready to do that to use Qt. Right now what stops them is the price of Qt for Windows. I was talking at the manner they are not getting the license but still be able to distribute free software on windows.

ME: It didn't happen but we have released the non commercial version for windows. Most free software projects, once they are out, get so many contributors, all under Gnu GPL, so you can not really add such an exception, later. Also, I don't forget that they're is an option and an option to use of the Cygwin and use the X11 for windows version GPL X11 version of Qt.

PF: Yes, but it's a heavy work for the one that are running the software, they have to run the X11 windows system with Cygwin. It won't work with small applications.

ME: Short answer: as a Free Software and KDE guy, yes, this is really unfortunate but there is nothing we can do about this.

PF: How are people reacting to QSA, the Qt Script for Applications ? Have you already have a commercial reaction about it?

EE: It has not been out there for that long but several customers needed that thing and it looks very positive so far. We sold several licenses.

This is very early in the process. Typically for a development tool like Qt and QSA, commercial customers need one to three month to really get into the product, evaluate it and see how they can use it. In few month we will see more clearly how it succeeds in the market.

PF: Would you see QSA using other scripting languages, like for example python ?

ME: QSA is the JavaScript. We could build a scripting solution, with other scripting languages, the binding technology is not tied to the language at all. This is possible. It depends on whether we see the commercial interest. The point is JavaScript/ECMAScript is very small language. If you ship an application and you make this application and this languages very easy to document and you can give that to your customers. If you bind python, your clients get this huge programming framework with all the additional tools.

I mean that QSA embedded makes your application scriptable, it is not a competitor to python and PyQt at all, this is not the point. To be technically clear, when you make your application scriptable in QSA, you do not have the entire Qt API accessible on script. You just write Qt code with your scripts but you have access to functionalities of your application, this is what people do with it.

PF: And was it possible to use the KDE JavaScript that have been developed for Konqueror?

ME: QSA is an extended version of the KJS engine.

PF: Is it really based on the same code ? Or it is just a rewrite.

ME: It is based on the same code and it was written by the same person, Harri Porten, who wrote the KJS engine, put it under a license that explicitly allowed to incorporate into other products.

And he was doing that work for Trolltech. The difference is that KJS is aiming for web browser, it means it support an older version of ECMAScript/JavaScript, with a lot of compatibility things. In QSA, we took a lot of those compatibilities out and followed the clean ECMA standard. This is also a modern version of the language that has object orientation and classes, that you do not have on the web JavaScript today.

PF: There was a real demand for the JavaScript language or you just choose this one because you find it simple?

EE: ECMAScript or JavaScript looks like a very strong pretender to be a standard embedded scripting language. We believe it is a very popular language and has been used in many places. Python and Perl are much more used as a stand-alone programming language. For example, Flash, is also used in ECMAScript, that's many more things like that.

PF: One question about team builder [a Trolltech tool to distribute compilations on multiple workstations] : is it successful ? I know there is an equivalent program running on Linux that does the same thing.

ME: It is not doing the same thing.

PF: And, is it selling well?

ME: It's selling better than what we invested in it, so in this way, it is a success. It is not a big part of profit income but it is a small extra product and because of the income we get from it, we can actually invest on it and improve it.

EE: It's a good product for larger customers having site licenses. They are normally interested. They have a large development group and lots of machines on the network.

PF: And to you plan to make it support the windows compiler too?

ME: Yes we do. It is not that simple because of the Microsoft compiler. It is much easier if you use GCC on windows. But the Microsoft compiler, the Microsoft "make" does not support parallel builds, so there is no option like "-j and here we go". This does not work. There are other ways in order to parallelise the build, that people could use but they are much more difficult.

PF: That's why you haven't released it initially ? That would really be a new product.

ME: You know windows compiler pre-compiles header files and this is something that does not really work if you distribute your build system. But the difference is, that if you use the Borland compiler on windows, it compiles like 10 to 15 times faster than GCC. So you don't really need teambuilder.

PF: Qt is becoming really fat with GUI stuff, Qt template libraries, XML, databases. Are you thinking about splitting it into different parts?

ME: Yes, but it can be done in a binary compatible fashion, that means it can not happened before the next binary incompatible version, Qt 4.

PF: Which is... when do you plan the next binary incompatible version?

EE: It is always difficult to say, there are discussions going on internally right now. We are working on the infrastructure for the next major release of Qt, this going to be 3.4 or 4, or whatever, we don't know.

I think that we have a very good creative development model and we try not to impose deadlines onto our developers.

ME: I would not hold my breath to wait for this version. We are having some plans. Qt 3 has been out there for a long time. Right now, we could say that wouldn't be within the next year, we'll have such a new version.

PF: Somebody mentioned that you have some specific prices for startup companies. Is that true?

EE: We try to be very flexible when start-up companies contact us for purchasing Qt. Sometimes we give early companies a delay in their payment, but this is done on a case by case basis, by our sales people.

In general, we want of course companies to purchase in the normal manner from us. We think Qt has a such a very high value to ease and speed development, not to mention the multi-platform capabilities that it's well worth it. I think most companies with a good business model can afford the license prices of Qt.

ME: On Windows, most small companies buy a windows license, an Microsoft Office license and Visual Studio license. If they use OpenOffice and GCC, they can easily afford the Qt license.

PF: How much of a nightmare is it to maintain Qt for so many systems platform what are the main difficulties? What are the easiest to maintain platform?

ME: The easiest platform are always the platforms that you use mainly yourself, where you write the code. I mean the various version of GNU/Linux are not a problem with X11 because that is what we use. Also, the latest versions of windows is typically a platform where there is no problem.

What is problem is the older versions. Unix has been around for ten years. They still sometimes quite support the POSIX API, they have old AIX servers, none of the new AIX extensions is available. So on HP and AIX, we sometimes have big problems.

On the other hand, on the windows platform we still support Windows 95 and 98 and it requires a lot of work as well.

PF: Are you still maintaining the three versions: Qt1, Qt2 and Qt3, all of them at the same time on all platforms?

EE: No, we maintain version 2 on embedded platforms and we maintain version 3 but in version 3 we maintain 3.0, 3.1 and the next version, that would be 3.2 .

PF: Have you ever thought of integrating something like curses and providing the possibility of using a text-based backend for Qt.

EE (laughing): Maybe for Qt 64? No, we did not thought about this. We don't see any market there. That would probably be a fun experiment, just as a weekend vacation hack thing and we welcome people to try. But we don't see a big commercial interest in such a product today.

PF: Why do you keep your documentation tool secret? And why don't you switch to Doxygen?

ME: You know the history of Doxygen?

Trolltech in 1995/1997 used the internal documentation tool to generate the documentation. Trolltech did not release the documentation tool because it was one big hacky Perl script and it did do exactly what it did, which was creating the Qt documentation so it wasn't really flexible enough to deploy in an application. When we released the free version there was a need for a documentation tool that followed Qt-style documentation. And that was Doxygen. Somebody wrote a C++ version with Qt to generate the Qt documentation and application documentation. That is Doxygen. Doxygen evolved very well, so in application code Doxygen is absolutely a good choice. We still use our internal tool because we want to be able to change something easily, like going ahead. When we introduced properties we had to document them and we changed our documentation tool. It also happened to integrate walk-through and tutorials. We see documentation as a big and important integral part of our product. And this is why we would like to have control, but our documentation tool is not general purpose enough that we could productify it. So we recommend people and our customers to use Doxygen.

PF: But don't you think that by making totally open you could have had some improvements because instead of writing Doxygen someone could have worked on your own tool, and you could had leveraging the free software effect?

ME: Nobody could have worked on it except ourselves !

PF: Okay, I see. Hacky Perl scripts...

PF: Okay. I wanted to congratulate you for your excellent advertising in commercial magazines with the Qt ads.

ME: So you like that.

PF: Yes, we found that very funny and it is exactly like we feel with Qt, the "unfair" advantage. I have been displaying them all at my workplace, for my colleagues.

PF: You probably know that XFree86 had internal problems recently, with Keith Packard mainly complaining that XFree wasn't moving much, that the core developers were not open enough to allow public access to the core. Do you have any opinion on this matter?

And secondly, I what is your opinion about how XFree fits with Qt development ? With all your experiences with the various graphical systems on other platforms, where do you think it should really be improved and what is ready good in XFree.

ME: That was many questions.

PF: There's a technical question and a political question.

ME: Okay, first the political one. We won't comment on the fate of XFree86 development, but what we will comment on is that, of course, we like to see new things in XFree86 and we appreciate that the development there was done in order to get anti-aliased fonts, in order to get alpha blending and render improvement. We think this is great development. Personally I hope there won't be a big split in the XFree86 community but both parties can work together well. And regardless what happens, I mean any significant X server or X server extension that has a significant distribution and really adds value is something that Trolltech will support. So we really see us in a position where we use and support XFree86 whatever they come up with.

PF: Yes. Now, regarding the technical qualities of XFree86?

ME: Yes, XFree is quite old. And it's surprisingly how much you still can do with it because you can extend the protocol with extensions and they were very smart to architect it this way. So we actually get very far. There are also many things we would wish X would do but that wouldn't be X anymore. One example that really annoys us is that everything is still 16 bit. Now, a window and all the drawing and all related is implemented in 16 bit. I mean, you can't display a long web page or long document without doing really hacks because of the 16 bit limitations. I think having something like that in 2003 feels a little bit odd.

On the other hand the server is everywhere and it's very well distributed and they did an excellent job. It's a great achievement, a piece of great technology.

PF: Do you plan to move to direct frame buffer support in the future?

ME: We have Qt/Embedded that works extensively on the frame buffer. Is that what you mean?

PF: Yes, but this is Qt/Embedded. Do you plan to provide this thing for the main Qt version? Or is it actually the same thing? I'm not technically familiar with this.

EE: I think that Matthias said that with the current distribution of the X window system, a Qt frame buffer version doesn't make sense at all. The X window system is a standard on Linux today on the desktop. We follow the markets and the standards.

ME: I saw on the dot that some people keep repeating that X is so horribly bloated and needs to be replaced on the desktop. We do not share this opinion. X is an excellent system on the desktop computer. Today's desktops' computers have enough memory, X is not really the problem. I am using the X remote features fairly extensively.

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. Historically Canopy became an investor because we cooperated with Caldera. As you might know we made and delivered the graphic install, which was the first graphical install for Linux, for Caldera Linux. The Canopy Group as the main investor in Caldera was so impressed by the work we had done that they wanted to invest in Trolltech, to make sure that Trolltech could become a solid company that could continue to deliver software to the Linux community. It's pretty ironic to see what has happened historically after that of course. But they don't have any influence on Trolltech. Trolltech is employee-owned, 65% of the shares are owned by the employees and we control the business so they have a small stake in us and that is it.

PF: You haven't talk about this complicated with SCO on Linux

EE: The patent issue or the corporate issue?

PF: The thing that SCO is asking and preparing to sue everybody about some code they pretend they own in Linux.

EE: I can tell you that we do not support these actions from SCO. Trolltech in many ways is dependent on the success of Linux. We think Linux is a Good Thing. We support Linux in many ways. On the other hand everybody has the right to bring his case to court. In this case it is very strange that they have not pinpointed exactly where in the code there is a problem and we feel that if they really had a problem with this, they could have acted very differently in presenting this to the community. So again we do not support these actions.

PF: You have any position on software patents? Especially since in the EU there is going to be a law to be passed soon.

EE: Trolltech is against software patenting. We think it is a bad thing and we see with horror what is happening to the US software market because of the patent policy over there. From my limited understanding of the subject, US patent law isn't that bad, it's the actual application of that law by the US patent office which is the problem. We sincerely hope that we will not get a parallel situation in Europe and we think that would be a catastrophe to the software industry in Europe. We think that we are well protected by copyright laws and other laws. we think that software is a very different product from other types of commercial production products. And we think that it is very important for innovation that people can continue to share ideas and that companies are not allowed to patent things which are very obvious.

PF: Thank you, I think I'm all done with all my questions. It was quite a long interview. Anything you would like to add in this conclusion?

EE: I think we went through a lot of things. It was a very good idea of you to ask the Dot for questions from people.

EE: Thank you for your time.