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."
