Either way, an idea for a browser feature is hardly a huge industrial secret - Webkit, Blink and Gecko have near-parity on features, and are competing more on speed. How would this stand up in court?
Neither Google nor Opera have anything to gain from this - what could be the economic rationale?
Change of engine, downsizing (and old-time developers fleeing the company), and now the lawsuit to me indicate that Opera Software now favors profits over preserving company's culture, image and web standards influence.
Hippies have left, suits have taken over.
These two things are not linked, stop trying to make it so.
How do you know it? Please tell us or stop making such blanket but unsupported statements
They are suing their former employee, not Mozilla.
> Webkit, Blink and Gecko have near-parity on features, and are competing more on speed
The former employee is an artist and a musician. The article says he worked on UI related stuff. None of this has anything to do with the web engine the browsers run.
You are taking the simple fact of Opera suing it's former employee and trying to make it look like there is much more to it than there really is.
I wonder what other conspiracy theories you love.
Is this really the tone of discourse we want here?
Hell, it's not even a conspiracy theory. OP just shared his point of view, you don't agree to it, it's fine. But please don't pick bs from a comment where there's no bs. It's almost as pathetic as name calling.
You are looking for a conspiracy theory? Here's one: Do you for sure know that Eric Schmidt didn't invite Opera board to a dark abandoned bungalow for a meeting and convinced them to pinch in Mozilla's hind in a proxy manner, promising to acquire(for a BIG sum) and kill Opera in return?
It's very hard to "destroy" a not-for-profit that has a substantial endowment.
Firefox, IMHO, is one real challenge to Chrome with IE to be outed the day most of the Internet is educated to better software and starts to learn making choices in a broad manner. Safari not counted of course. So, as I said that leaves Firefox and Chrome in the arena. And a Firefox wounded with a financial blow shall be meat for Chrome. Things that's keeping Firefox in race and that is innovation, freedom, privacy advocacy. Without much money in the bank or boggled with court cases it's going to be real hard.
Then again, the cheapest way for him to win this battle is in the public arena; without the particulars of their complaint, which we'll hopefully soon learn about, it's hard to say.
But I can say it's never a good sign when a company starts to compete in the courtrooms.
Also this kind of actioning is distrubing from a company like opera.
Death throes?
"When I left the Opera, I did not feel my ideas bore fruit, and I also notified management about. I am a very creative person and I feel that my ideas had value. I would like that my ideas were to reach users".
I'm all for keeping trade secrets, but this more along the lines of abstract ideas, not the sort of thing you'll have an easy time in a court of law proving.
> Death throes?
Yeah .. I've been an avid Opera fan for many years (since version 5 or 6), but recently a lot of things they do are turning a bit smelly ... Sad to see this happening, they're the only European (or non-US) browser. Not that I'm particularly "(euro-)nationalistic" about that, but I think diversity is a good thing.
The article talks about features which aren't really IP. Perhaps their trade-secrets relate to coding and construction methods that make their product superior, but these really can't be protected unless they're so esoteric that no one would logically come up with them independently.
So they sue a non-profit to stifle competition in their industry ... show me more innovation (and market-share) than Mozilla and then maybe I'll believe you're the innovator.
As a side note, 80% of features in Mozilla were first done in Opera. I even remember a Firebird (as it was called back in the day, before version 1.0) fan or zealot badmouthing Opera and its tabs as being a ridiculous and unnecessary feature. After just four months, that feature was copied. It seems that crowd has not changed even a little.
The only good thing in Mozilla is the OSS license. The only reason they have market share is the OSS license.
By the way, it wasn't just about the OSS license. Back in the day Opera had a big honking ad right in the main window. They only released an ad-free version in 2005, when Firefox already had 16 times the share of Opera.
I was surprised, but Wikipedia has a nice article in reference to Opera's features[1]. It even lists most of the dates the features were added/created. Opera also has a fairly large mobile market share[2], which is where Opera has traditionally pushed their browser more so than the desktop since the mid 2000s.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_of_the_Opera_web_brows...
[2] http://9to5mac.com/2013/04/03/safaris-mobile-browser-market-...
It seems it's a Norwegian case - they seem to have pretty strict laws for trade secrets laid out in the above pdf. The claim is given in Norwegian Krone.
"For the record: we have not yet had the chance to look at the lawsuit documents or discuss the specifics of the allegations and size of the claimed damages with Opera management or its lawyers, but we’ll update this post as soon as we have."
That said, I did not understand a better way to put my point across. The article barely mentions Mozilla, doesn't mention Google at all. They talk about why a guy (a mozilla employee, a former Opera employee) was getting sued.
It does not talk about Opera suing Mozilla. Period. OP took that information and extrapolated it to Opera suing Mozilla because they are chums with Google now.
This is a huge jump in reasoning without any substantial evidence to point at. I am sure there is a Latin phrase for what kind of fallacy it is. I am unaware of it. But I have seen this happen in conspiracy theories, so I put it in the mildest way I could think of. If that offended anyone, I apologize.
The actual teams, on the other hand, are all profit-seeking entities and pay taxes accordingly.
Edit: Seems Opera added tabs slightly before Mozilla after looking it up out of interest[2]. Also just some random history on tab integration in web browsers. Mozilla 0.9.5 added them a few months after Opera 4 in 2001, though of course neither was the first. I guess one can say Opera was the first browser to add them that is still a fairly popular browser in present day.
Four years later, in 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser. That same year, a text editor called UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by a number of others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in [June] 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although a MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on 1 April 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[7]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_of_the_Opera_web_brows...
[1]: There's a feature request since 2000, but it was never implemented: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60775
That big ad is a sad bit of Internet history. A wasted opportunity.
Also: they had a deal with Google to make it the default search engine before Firefox had one.
"Selling out": Opera had it first!
Jon's closing email is also quite telling:
Dear All,
It is with a heavy heart that I send this message. Next week will be my last
at Opera. It has become clear that The Board, Management and I do not share
the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep evolving
Opera. As a result I have come to an agreement with the Board to end my time
at Opera. I feel the Board and Management is more quarterly focused than me.
I have always worked to build the company for the future. I believe the
foundation we have is very solid to build further upon.
I do believe strongly in Opera as a company, and in all of you working here.
Our products actually make a difference for a lot of people in the world, and
I wish you all the best of luck moving forward. I will be following the
company closely and rooting for you all.
Yours truly, Jon.Related: http://techie-buzz.com/opera/opera-tetzchner-reacts.html
While such wild speculation probably can't get you in trouble in the US of A, some European libel laws probably would require a little more than "seemed like it to me" as a reason to publish an assertion of an association.
The whole thing is a fairly weird set up designed to avoid antitrust scrutiny and taxes.
The NFL org just plows any profits back into the teams.
There's a lot more to the Packers' ownership; technically they are for-profit in Wisconsin due to state laws, but operate as a non-profit that issues stock. The stock does not have dividends, technically can only be transferred to family members, and has a per-person cap. Other teams can only have a few dozen joint owners; the Packers have something like 150,000 distinct "owner" shareholders that vote on things like stadium enhancements, etc. This is also why they haven't been moved from Green Bay -- too many rabid fans own shares that would never approve a move from Green Bay.
They are the only major sports team in the US to be structured anything like it.
Profits, as indicated on their public books, are either put back into the stadium/city development or go toward another non-profit that's quite active in Wisconsin.
Well in that regard they failed, as the Congress passed laws decades ago quite specifically exempting the professional sports leagues from antitrust claims relating to sports broadcasting rights, and that was in response to a Supreme Court ruling on the antitrust problems with the NFL.
And now with the NFL Network people are looking closely into whether that antitrust exemption should be retained at all. So I think it's hard to claim that the NFL is managing to use this to avoid antitrust scrutiny; if anything the NFL is bringing even more of it on themselves.
> The NFL org just plows any profits back into the teams
Which then shows up as extra income for the teams, which increases their profit (except for the Packers), which leads to higher taxes, etc. etc.
I'm sure you can play accounting tricks to reduce the impact of the extra income but I see nothing weird by itself with having a League office to handle League-wide affairs that don't involve individual teams.
At least their supreme court arguments were that they were operating as a single entity, "the NFL". They specifically called out their structure as being proof of this. Thus, this structure was, in part in attempt to avoid antitrust scrutiny.
It was certainly a failure, but that doesn't mean it wasn't one of the reasons they did it :)
First of all, European libel law requires a demonstrably false statement which 'seems to' by definition isn't.
Secondly, libel would be a civil offense so even if I were to be charged it would be the damage I caused to Opera at minimum (lowest value the judge deems to certain to have occurred.)
So basically only if I made a categorically false claim and it caused a demonstrable amount of loss (e.g. a contract with defined monetary value falling apart) would I be seriously affected by European libel law.
1) While the qualifying comment used "seemed linked to me", the original post had no such qualifiers and asserted its points without anything backing it. I admit its a bit pendantic, and in American usage easier to "get away with" on a comment board. If you were a US TV news or print outlet, you'd have to pre-frame the comments with "editorial" or "opinion", to cover your legal bases.
2) Yes.
3) Probably :-)