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Opera Settles $12.75m Lawsuit, But with Whom?
An anonymous reader writes "According to a press release from Opera Software ASA, they have settled legal claims with an
international corporation resulting in payment to Opera of net USD 12.75 million. The interesting bit is that the international corporation is unknown. Dagbladet speculates that Microsoft is paying up. They reason it has something to do with this."
I really enjoy the Opera interface, but I am a FireFox diehard as many other people here are, so I wonder why Opera? Why not FireFox, or one of the others, Mozilla, etc. etc.? I'm sure its Slashdotly correct to assume that MS and the MSN website issue are the reason for this money but perhaps its something much less sinister. Mod me down if you want but I think putting something like this on the front page is just spreading unnessecary FUD.
Please do not let scientific accuracy interfere with the intended humourous/interesting/insightful value of this comment
Nice attempt at reasoning, but _arbitrary_ restrictions relating to sale/use of your product are viewed as discriminatory. I say _arbitrary_ because you can discriminate on objective reasons, even if they are "my nightclub is about stylish people, so we only let in those well dressed and with good attitude".
Secondly, it's more severe when the discrimination relates to a competitive product, and even more so when you are a dominant company. When you're building a large content service on the one hand, and owning a viewing technology on the other hand, and in both cases you have a dominant market share: then arbitrary restraints on competitors are pretty serious issues that regulators will tackle.
I note also that recent Microsoft has been doing a _lot_ of out of court settlements, it seems as though they want to pay off problems. Equally, the large anti-trust rulings mean that Microsoft is skating on thin-ice and has the scrutiny of the regulators who would use such activities as future evidence in antitrust actions.
Better to reach a settlement which involves a confidentiality clause in which the supposed activities won't in the future be disclosed or used in any regulatory action.
Wise commercial move Microsoft!
But if MSN was deliberately breaking Opera -- why not do the same to Netscape and Mozilla?? After all, they're more of a market threat than Opera. And why restrict the breakage to Opera7? That doesn't seem to have much point. And Opera's own analysis page says the CSS sent to Opera*6*, and to Netscape, was NOT broken.
Given that, it does look like a case of stupidity rather than malice. There's not much point in only breaking a single version of a minority browser, especially when that version is still so new as to be not yet widely adopted even by its fans.
I'd guess someone at MSN tested their CSS with a broken beta of Opera7, and built an Opera7-specific CSS to account for said breakage, but never tested again with the release version.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"Bottom line is, you start depending on the features unique to opera and you WILL become dependant on the browser. "
Agreed. It's a pity they don't show the cartoons in the advertising bar anymore. I actually switched back to the ad supported version hoping to encourage them to keep plopping them in there. Wouldn't it be cool if they took comics like Dilbert or Get Fuzzy and had them appear regularly there? Certainly made me more attentive to the ads. Small price to pay for some entertainment.
"Derp de derp."