Open Source Blog

7.5 million shares were offered by the company with an opening price of NOK 16 ($2.56) per share. At the time of writing shares are trading at NOK 19 ($3.05) per share - you can track their progress here.

It was mentioned at the recent OSBC conference that Trolltech's was only the third open source IPO in history. That is not entirely accurate, but Trolltech is in exclusive company.

Linux distributor Red Hat led the way and although its share price initially paid the price for dot com exuberance the company is of course still going strong.

Red Hat shares have fared rather better than those of VA Linux, which opened with one of the most successful openings in stock market history before the dot com bust shattered the company's revenue and stock price.

Now known as VA Software the company is also still going, of course, and its shares are still traded on the Nasdaq National under the symbol LNUX.

There have been other near misses, with Linspire cancelling its IPO in August 2004 as the $20m it accepted from Microsoft to change its name from Lindows made the offering unnecessary, while the original Turbolinux cancelled its IPO in 2001 citing difficult market conditions.

Turbolinux eventually found its way to the stock market in September 2005, however, raising $9m via an IPO on the Japanese Osaka Securities Exchange. In between the Japanese Linux distributor was owned by Software Research Associates and then Livedoor, while the company's US operation eventually became server-provisioning vendor Mountain View Data. Turbolinux's share price has steadily declined since its IPO, however.

The company cancelled its original IPO shortly after it pulled out of a planned merger with Linux services company LinuxCare, which had pulled out of its own planned IPO with just weeks to go in April 2000 as the share prices of Red Hat and VA tanked. LinuxCare eventually became Linux systems management vendor Levanta.

The other, often forgotten, open source IPO involved French Linux distributor Mandriva, which made its debut on the Euronext Marche Libre in July 2001 as Mandrakesoft, offering 688,480 shares at 6.2 Euros each.

The company returned to the Euronext in 2004 after it existed the French equivalent of bankruptcy protection but a period of share performance growth has been matched since early 2005 by a steady decline.

Trolltech's management and shareholders will be hoping for better.