Opera gets in bed with Google Chrome and then sues the other camp? I thought they were above all this.
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?
I don't think switch to Google's engine is the cause, it's rather another symptom of the same thing — after Jon von Tetzchner has left Opera Software has changed their priorities.
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.
They seem linked to me. Since cases like this are much harder to pull off under European law unless you can show actual copy-pasted code, this (like the WebKit move) looks like the symptoms of clueless non-technical management taking over and destroying the company by desperately trying to 'save it.'
I'm trying to say that they are linked through an underlying cause. Pornel says it much better than me in his comment though.
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.
In that email he was probably referring to the direction the board wanted to take Opera in. There has been consistent speculation that Opera's board wanted to make Opera better suited for sale, and was looking forward to getting acquired by someone with deeper pockets. JvT of course, wanted to stay independent and continue to innovate.
They don't have to. The parent postulated that they are linked because they are both the result of non-technical management. Stating that this is not mentioned in the article is meaningless as a rebuttal.
Would be nice to have the postulate backed by something other than proximity in the poster's posting, and the poster's speculation, however.
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.
It seems at least tangentially related considering in that they probably wouldn't have sued Firefox if they had just decided to switch to the Gecko browser engine. (Or if Hansen had supposedly divulged trade secrets to the Chrome team).
> Opera gets in bed with Google Chrome and then sues the other camp? I thought they were above all this.
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'm amazed at how bad the comments are here. Pretty sad seeing only one sane, reasonable post in a sea of conspiracy theory bullshit and bitter resentment.
Really? How do you know it's not a conspiracy theory? You don't know that and so does OP.
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?
I admit calling out OP for creating a conspiracy theory was a little bit too harsh.
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.
I'm not sure, but the phrase "early browser innovations that first saw the light of day over at Opera Software, including tabbed browsing, speed dial, mouse gestures and integrated search" might be a hint. It's hard to imagine now, but Opera had tabs years before any other browser did (maybe even from the start? I started using Opera with version 5 or 6). Opera was also first with those other features, although (iirc) not by as large of a margin as with tabs.
Google funds basically all of Mozilla's budget, something like $300M/yr. Google does not consider Mozilla a rival. If they wanted to destroy Mozilla, they would just need to not renew their funding agreement.
One of my close friends works for Mozilla. I was told by him that they need to spend most, if not all of their money every year. So I don't think they have a substantial amount of money in the bank.
Google hugely benefits from Mozilla search deal. I am sure companies like Amazon, Yahoo and Bing shall jump to the opportunity.
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.
Good point; from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5629255, if the sued employee is even vaguely telling the truth, unless Norwegian trade secret law is vastly different from US they don't vaguely have a case.
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.
He has denied the allegations (as expected). But, at the same time, he also told this to Digi.No.
"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".
This is probably closer to the truth. Seems like Opera is acting more like a jilted lover than anything else. Guy has some good ideas and in the interest of profit, they get buried. He goes across the street where Mozilla sees the potential and implements them and now Opera wants he to pay up for them?
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.
> Also this kind of actioning is distrubing from a company like opera.
> 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.
There's nothing disturbing about protecting trade secrets, if this is what it is. Now if this was about a non-compete clause, I might agree with you...
Their lawsuit claims that "Opera Software ASA is an innovative company which has developed software and technology which have proved to be successful internationally".
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.
Trond Werner Hansen is not a non-profit. In fact, he's not even a corporation.
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.
I don't think the event you describe was possible, because Mozilla had tabs before Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox even existed. In any case, Opera copied the tabs from other browsers too, so I'm not sure what's your point with that story.
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 think he perhaps means tabs with a true document interface[1] (i.e multiple web pages can be opened within the same application window and be resized, moved, tiled, and cascaded like normal application windows in the operating system).
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.
It's more about the attitude of Firefox users against Opera than anything else...they had a deal with Google to make it the default search engine before Firefox had one.
> ... show me more innovation (and market-share) than Mozilla and then maybe I'll believe you're the innovator.
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.
I feel what you're saying on this since the pro leagues being nonprofits seems silly on the surface but you could say that about any trade organization really. The US has a real problem with what's allowed to define itself as non-profit (scam religions like crack churches and Scientology, fake athlete charities, etc) but I don't think Mozilla falls in that camp.
It's not just a US concept. Norway seems to have fairly strong protections on the expression of ideas - i.e. you can't copyright ideas in many cases. I wonder do they have special laws for trade secrets. Opera are going to have difficulty hiring people if they are suing former employees.
This is a trade secret case. If he genuinely had trade secrets (the bar for that is pretty high in the US), things like work for hire, non-competes (which are officially allowed in the US outside of California to prevent the "first bite of the apple" of trade secret disclosure), etc. are irrelevant.
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."
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?