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Microsoft Behind $12M Opera Settlement
An anonymous reader writes "According to CNET it has been confirmed that Microsoft is behind the $12 million dollar payment to Opera (speculated earlier here). The payment was to avoid legal action over interoperability issues with Opera's web browser and Microsoft's MSN portal.
On at least three separate occasions, Opera has accused Microsoft of deliberately breaking interoperability between its MSN Web portal and various versions of the Opera browser--charges that the software giant has repeatedly denied."
This is starting to happen a lot lately. Microsoft is having money taken, because they try to push the little guys around.
Hopefully they'll learn from this mistake. Probably not, if an AU$800 Million fine from the EU isn't enough to change their business practices, nothing will.
At least the one company that truly stands for browser innovation will have some more cash to spend on product development. Pity it's just a drop in the ocean to Microsoft though.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Microsoft was purposely serving up broken style sheets for Opera; changing the user agent to something other that Opera would cause MSN to render correctly. For more on that, see the Opera article Why doesn't MSN work with Opera?
Microsoft business practices aside, I really, really hate the fact that IE development is at a standstill. Microsoft has said they won't release a new IE until Longhorn.
Meanwhile we have to kiss web standards goodbye to please 90% of the public using IE.
Amusingly there's a work-around under development called IE7, mentioned on Slashdot a while back.
But the fact is Microsoft is keeping us from adopting things like CSS2, PNG and SVG more than anything else.
.: Max Romantschuk
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For a small company like Opera, the settlement is significant, I'd imagine. Not only did they get their main beef settled, they get a little cash infusion to boot.
But these snippets from the article
The deal marks the latest in a string of settlements from Microsoft, which is seeking to simplify its business by clearing up potentially damaging legal claims.
and
Microsoft has effectively abandoned significant browser development efforts.
make me wonder, what has Microsoft got up its collective sleeve? They cornered the browser market and now they'll give it up without a fight? Why should they make an effort to clean up their legal image when it didn't seem to phase them for such a long time?
I don't doubt that whatever they've got planned, history indicates it's probably part of a well thought out business or marketing plan. Other thoughts?
As this article in BusinessWeek points out, Microsoft is trying to settle and partner rather than fight in court.
Settlements like this should not be kept secret. Even more so when publicly held companies are involved ... and fo damn sure when one of the companies has been found guilty of predatory practices.
Maybe MS's sentence should have included banning them from private deals and settlements.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Does this mean that Mozilla can now sue Microsoft because Windows Update only works with IE >= 5? When I try to access Windows Update using Mozilla 1.6, I get the following:
I suppose the last sentence is some concession to those of us who run non-IE browsers. However, the Microsoft Download Center won't tell you which updates you need. Apparently, only Windows Update can do that...
Nothing short of criminal prosecution, and jail sentences for Gates, Ballmer and a few others, will ever make these guys behave properly. They have a consistent track record.
The question now is this money is enough, if not for Microsoft to be punished, at least for Opera to repair the damage done.
Is 12M$ enough money for a company like Opera to reinvent themselves?
With the IE as the widespread browser, and with that money to take a break, IMHO Opera should think about opening other branches, maybe give a try to open source solutions.
DON'T PANIC
Innocent until proven guilty, remember?
Just because they settled doesn't mean they're guilty. They most likely just decided that it would be cheaper to settle than fight it. Settlements ALWAYS includes a "this isn't an admission of guilt" clause.
MS is having to pay out all the time. They always have since their inception. Can anyone count the number of settlements that have gone against MS? (Read, MS paid out) relative to the number that have favored MS?
I'm happy for Opera, but this really is just business as usual for MS.
Nice job US DOJ, you really reined them in.
So David is really responsible for the rampages of Golliath, eh?
... eh? This makes no sense.
...
... but thank you anyway, U.S. Justice System, for ensuring that my rights as a consumer, and my ability to weild choice are protected in the browser marketplace ...
Opera accepting the money has nothing to do with Microsofts shady business practices. WTF?
By your reasoning, a woman is as guilty as a rapist for the rape committed
A $12million settlement, which is a punishment for having done something wrong, followed by well-propagated news on the reasons for this punishment, is the only safeguard this industry has from future shadiness of this nature... you saying that "Opera are 'as responsible'" for this is just ludicrous, and underlines a serious lack of understanding of the nature of responsibility
Microsoft attempted to weild un-defeatable might in an attempt to squeeze competition out of the marketplace, and 'get rid of a company that is clearly annoying them', and the justice system caught this, and ruled for the little guy, as it should, punishing Golliath all the while.
Go Opera! If I wasn't so satisfied with Safari, I'd switch
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1 Write good software
2 Wait for MIcrosoft to steal it or disable it
3 Profit!
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
What, you think they wouldn't if they could? They were beaten to the punch on all the worthwhile patents. The only reason they don't run around slapping people with patent infringement claims is that they know they're on shaky ground in that department, and that's probably one weak spot that Microsoft couldn't throw enough money at to become an industry leader in.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
If I borrow and crash your car and I kill a horse (or something), and I have to repay you the worth of the car, and you accept my money, you also accept that you are responsible for crashing the car? That's nice, then you can help me repaying the cost of the horse.
yeah, but the story is bullshit. For one, Microsoft have not admitted liability, they have just settled out of court
A little Norwegian company which poses no threat to Microsoft, and in fact builds it business on Microsoft products (Windows) claims they have targeted them. It's a non-story. On one occasion all non-IE browsers were locked out of MSN. This was quickly reversed, and certainly wasn't targeted at Opera.
On another occasion an incompetent programmer worked around a bug with margins on UL (instead of setting margin: 0 to give lists no margin, you had to do -30px to reset the default 30px margin to 0) - but the bug wasn't actually present in Opera, so the text was overlapping.
The stupid conspiracy theorists claim that the programmer who wrote the style sheet was somehow acting on company policy to 'get Opera'. I call bullshit on that. Microsoft is a big company - and even in my small company, my manager doesn't direct how I write my style sheets. I mean for fuck's sake! A simple coding error is treated as a big conspiracy.
Here's what Wikipedia says on the whole story:
In October 2001, the MSN web page was changed to lock out most non-Microsoft browsers, shortly after the launch of Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. According to initial statements by Microsoft, this was because other browsers did not support XHTML correctly, and users should therefore upgrade to its own Internet Explorer. This issue also affected other browsers in similar ways. Microsoft backed down after being confronted with proof showing that, if anything, other browsers were better at rendering XHTML than Internet Explorer.
In February 2003, Opera Software employees discovered that the MSN home page sent a different style sheet to Opera users than it sent to Internet Explorer. The style sheet sent to Opera users, a generic 'site.css', contained the style rule ul {margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px;}, which created a 30-pixel negative left margin, causing content to appear overlapping other content. The Internet Explorer style sheet did not contain this rule.
This gave the impression something was wrong with Opera. The Netscape 6 style sheet also specified the same -30px margin, to work around known bugs in that browser (bugs not present in Opera). This same code was present into the supposedly generic style sheet, which was served to Opera by a Javascript checking routine which specifically detected Opera. This was either a deliberate decision by a programmer to make Opera look bad, or was simply the action of someone who was aware of Opera's existence, but unaware of its CSS capabilities (which are in fact better than those of Internet Explorer), and hence chose to send the browser a generic (albeit badly coded) style sheet.
PS. Don't forget, for Microsoft it's quicker to pay $10 million and get them to go away than to even investigate. Lawyers are expensive, and if you think in every case settled 'justice' was done, you are incredibly naive.
If this is really Microsoft, why does everyone assume that this is about a single episode with a single site, rather than a pattern, when MS has been doing this for a long time? Or just the fact that a Microsoft spokesperson used the media to spread several blatant lies about Opera (the alleged lack of XHTML support, as well as other things)?
The comment you are linking to isn't really relevant since Microsoft haven't done this kind of thing against Opera only once. They have done it several times, and have also been spreading lies about Opera.
Maybe you should keep that in mind before jumping to conclusions.
Clever signature text goes here.
Alas....
Patenting the hell out of everything is hardly moral and just as childish.
If they settle, they're guilty. Thats how the public sees it and in truth that's the way I see it.
So what that there is a clause in there. If they pay money out, then they have something to hide, and they're only paying it off so when they lose in court, it will be MUCH more than the payoff. So yes, it would be cheaper than being found guilty.
If they WERE right, they could take it all the way to court knowing that they would win...and then having the other side pay the court costs. MS didn't do this, they knew they were wrong and GUILTY so they decided to pay their way out...again.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
But this is not the only case of bad journalism. Another example:
This is just wrong. Opera isn't just "looking to move past the PC". They have been doing this for years. Just a quick look on opera.com shows press releases about this back in 2000. In 2001, the Sharp Zaurus had Opera on it.Now, I am not saying that it cannot possibly be Microsoft. It probably is. But this is pure speculation, and CNET is portraying it as fact. And they seem to focus on one single site, rather than the on-going problems with Opera and Microsoft sites due to browser sniffing and singling out Opera, and Microsoft's blatant lies about Opera in the press.
Clever signature text goes here.
Let me put it this way: Eh?
Does this imply that for 1 out of 10 IE doesn't deliver content? Well, not that I'd wonder about that. It's M$ software after all...
this is one of my gripes about some websites. i noticed shutterfly has a "Click Next if you wish to skip future warnings and use Shutterfly with this unsupported browser." great, i can make the choice to puruse a sub-"standard" website if i still want to. sometimes i think they forget that they are offering goods/services that i can find somewhere else.
Yes, I have RTFA. Yes, I have a girlfriend. Yes, I'm new here. And no, I don't want a free iPod.
I think you have the logic backwards. They care who is using their browser so MUCH that they were willing to give it away. They care so MUCH that they included the browser with the OS.
The more people who use their browser, the more people they can influence/control how they browse the web.
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tinfoil hat alert!
yes, IE is quite secure in M$-windows desktop/laptop browser dominance. besides Opera there are a few other browsers for computers...... but the cell phone/PDA market is still up in the air. M$ has their own OS for cell phones and PDAs, and if they can show people that Opera's offerings for devices doesn't work so well, it may help their case. Add to the fact that EVERY Verizon DSL customer is now considered an MSN subscriber their numbers are growing (on paper).
maybe i'm wrong, but unless it's something personal i would think Mozilla is still a bigger threat to IE than Opera in the PC realm. I would guess this is for some emerging market.... being cellphone/PDAs or some other embedded devices (cable boxes or whatever?).
Excerpt from Opera's privacy policy.
In fact, Opera is an exemplary company, and even allows their developers to interact and answer questions on USENET and other forums. I've been a registered user of Opera for some time now, and I've always been amazed by their level of customer support and service.I'm not sure what you mean by a sensible business model. It is possible to BUY the product, as well as using a free version (with advertising). I guess "sensible business model" according to some regulars here mean "Give it away for free, and buy lots of lottery tickets or hope some investor will bail you out", but that model actually stopped working 4 years ago.
Opera actually makes money.
What MS is doing is not fine. They are detecting that you are using Opera and making Opera look bad by serving it bad code. It is not "perfectly legit" at all.
Clever signature text goes here.
You fell prey to one of life's classic blunders. The most famous is, 'Don't get involved in a land war in Asia. Slightly less well known is Don't get involved in patent pissing contest with IBM when money is on the line'.
Look up if you have time a recent setback for MS were they were told to remove the clause from their contracts that stops their OEM's from enforcing their patents against MS.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What about accessibility laws? Do they apply only to government agencies, or can private/commercial websites be liable for gratuitously locking out a portion of the user population?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
IE's dominance has also created fallout for Web standards, because Microsoft delivers the Web to roughly nine out of every 10 people who use it.
I wonder what it delivers to the other 1 in 10?
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Just try one of the non-ms "modern" phones. Shouldn't be too hard. Most are non-ms. All the nokia ones I seen had an opera browser.
This is something MS doesn't like. It has tried everything it could outside murder to get a foothold in the mobile phone market without success. PDA's are slightly more succesfull but its old reputation of rebooting is really hurting it from the customer perspective. PDA's and certainly PC's we are used to being bugged but we expect or mobile phones to be like our land line phones. Just working.
From the phone makers perspective MS reputation of screwing everyone makes them very determined not to rely on MS software.
So in yes opera is a real threat. If ever that vision where the Mobile phone will be the main computer everyone uses and not the PC then people might also suddenly see that an OS doesn't have to be rebooted and that browser do exist that just bloody work.
So opera is a real threat. So why did MS settle? Even Bill Gates must be learning from all the legal problems MS is having. Sure 12 million is nothing to MS but it ain't 12 million. It is 12 million to opera, 600 million to the EU, close to a billion to various american states, lots of other legal cases being settled all the tune of millions, the case against lindows wich is not going all that well. Each individual case will not be enough but put them all together and MS is losing some real money while gaining nothing.
And each and every case only shows MS as the evil company. Not good.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You don't know what you are talking about. MSN was sending broken pages to Opera, while Opera was perfectly capable of displaying the pages served when it identified itself as IE.
You have two options in the free version of Opera:
A) Relevant text ads, using Google Adsense. Google needs to know which site you're visiting.
B) Generic banner ads.
How to select ad model:
1. In Opera, go to File/Preferences/Advertising.
2. Put one hand on the top of your head.
3. If the fingers on the hand mentioned in instruction 2 can feel the presence of tinfoil, select ad model B
4. If not, choose model A
As for your comments about conspiracy theories, this isn't just something which has happened once. Opera has been specifically detected and served broken code on several occasions on MSN.com, and lately on MSNBC.com. In addition to this, a Microsoft spokesperson lied about Opera to the media.
You are criticizing others for assuming too much, yet you don't even bother to inform yourself on the matter.
This isn't just one case of a bad style sheet on MSN. This is something which has repeated itself over and over.
Clever signature text goes here.
You know what they say, 'the proof is in the puding' or something...
compelling evidence
I don't use Opera, but I've seen this firsthand.
I also remember a while back where they flat out blocked mozilla from MSN, but the bad public backlash made them reverse it. I actually tried that one for myself and saw that it was real.
Innocent Until Proven Guilty is nice, but lets face it- we've tried that. they've broke the system countless times. they've keep saying "we'll change, honest. I'll never hit you again" and we keep falling for it like an abused wife.
MS won't stop until we actually PUNISH them... perhaps a $20 billion fine would help?
that might knock some sense into them. and for each breach afterwards, another $1 billion fine.
not in software- they'ed just spend $.01 in CD's and ship a couple thousand versions of their latest and greatest OS.
Someone needs to call shananigans on these bastards.
Honestly, I wish Opera didn't have to settle. Theoretically, they could win the case, but by the time they won, $12 million woulda been pocket change for a hobo.
This is probably one of my greatest pet peeves with Micosoft. They fricken abuse the system.
They're just not trustworthy.
Innocent until proven guilty is nice, but how long are we going to wait to finally punish them for the things we KNOW they did wrong?
(sorry, don't take that as a personal attack, I just get worked up over MS).
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What really sickens me is Opera gets almost half the settlement that Be, Inc. got (about $25 million).
Now compare the two offenses. Screwing up a few Microsoft webpages for Opera users, vs. destroying a company with anti-trust tactics, such as squashing deals between Be and other OEM's (see: Hitachi)... Christ I could go on, but it's too depressing. Long live MacOS and PalmOS NG.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Their money comes from bulk licenses sold to phone makers and similar. Not from consumer licenses.
Sure it would be nice if opera was a real contender on the PC market but how do you compete with a free product when quality is something only tiny percentage of customers understand? Even mozilla and its offspring is having a hardtime and they are free.
Also if you run multipl OS'es, having one single browser between them is awfully handy. I can't tell you how much more I swear at IE now that it is refusing to listen to my mouse movements whenever I am on a non-opera machine.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If I had to venture a guess - they're going to buy a big media company. The only business that has more control than MS in their respective field is the entertainment industry. Once you have more money than you know what to do with, what do you go after? Controlling information. MS lost with controlling the internet, so they are going to go for the popular media.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I see no problems with their current pricing structure:
"Don't want to pay for our software? You can view ads as an alternative."
"Don't like adverts? Pay a low fee if you like the software."
Really, what is your problem in paying for software you like to use if you don't want to view adverts?
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The Opera crowd repeatedly asked the MSN crowd to fix the style sheet. The style sheet used for IE worked fine with Opera. The correction involved less work than this post. Say what you want about M$'s motives, but if I were Opera I'd sue too.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Opera obviously does support XHTML, and issued a press release in XHTML which points out Microsoft's lie.
This and other lies from Microsoft are exposed in an Opera press release.
Clever signature text goes here.
Microsoft's lies are covered in this press release from Opera.
Clever signature text goes here.
But the key is that there's no legal record of them being told they were wrong, nor any admittance of guilt. In essence, this protects them from setting precedent that can be used against them in a subsequent case for much larger damages.
It doesn't matter to the court whether the public opinion thinks they're guilty or not. And the only weapon the public has against actions like this is to not use the company's products, and we don't see that happening at all now, do we?
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Umm no. Your facts are simply incorrect.
Opera was being sent a different style sheet, as well as a different html file, than IE or Netscape. This style sheet was not a generic one for non-IE browsers, as was verified to by using wget with a faked user-agent field. There were three style sheets, one for Netscape only, one for Opera only, and one for all other browsers. So Opera was definately specifically targetted with this. And the files sent to Opera contained commands to force them to layout improperly, whereas the generic files sent to IE and unknown browsers displayed just fine in Opera.
You can see screenshots and a detailed explanation of what was happening here.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
which is a punishment for having done something wrong
No, it's not. It's a method of avoiding a lengthy trial. It's not an admission of guilt by any stretch of the imagination. Many companies settle because it's cheaper to do so than go to trial. My old employer would pretty much settle automatically on any lawsuit that was for under $20,000 because it would cost that much to just get their lawyers geared up. It's a relatively prudent business decision...do we pay $100,000 in order to avoid spending $20,000? MS made the same decsion..."It's impossible to prove we DIDN'T do something (the basis of all conspiracy theories), so do we spend millions and millions in court costs and negative advertising on a trial, or do we just give them $12M to go away?"
thank you anyway, U.S. Justice System, for ensuring that my rights as a consumer, and my ability to weild choice are protected in the browser marketplace
You really need to get a clue on how the justice system works before you start praising it. This is the biggest FLAW in the justice system. In order to stop these frivlous lawsuits, the law needs to change to protect corporations and individuals from them. Something along the lines of "If you bring suit, and lose, you're responsible for all the defendant's court and legal fees as well as punitive damages equal to thrice that amount" should do the trick. Then, companies like Opera will stop bringing suits against larger companies like Microsoft in the hopes of getting a settlement. They know MS will settle, they don't have to be right, or prove it in court. It's an easy $12M influx.
In this instance, Opera is the evil corporation manipulating the system for its own gain.
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You mean apart from the fact that MSN is used by millions upon millions of people, and that when they discover that it works fine in Internet Explorer but not in Opera, it gives the impression that it is Opera which doesn't work properly?
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There's some problems with your legal reasoning. Opera and Microsoft sat down together and agreed on the settlement. If it was some sort of foregone conclusion that Microsoft was going to lose big, then Opera wouldn't have agreed.
You can't just assume that any kind of court proceeding will find the ultimate truth of the matter. If you've followed many of the major IP law cases in the last couple years, you'd see that the outcomes are seldom easily predictable. Some judges don't understand the technology, sometimes the laws involved are outdated and difficult to map onto the situation at hand, and sometimes the laws seem to outright conflict with each other (DMCA vs. Fair Use). As a big company going into one of these cases, you won't get a certain victory or certain loss; you're lucky if you can get a fairly accurate guess at the odds.
That's where the settlement starts. If you're talking about a judgement of 20 million, and both sides think they've got a 50-50 shot, then they can settle on 10 million. If the plantiff thinks they've only got a 10 percent shot (which would be the case even if the defendent was pretty clearly in the right) then they'll happily settle for 3 million.
So maybe Microsoft was guilty here, maybe they weren't. All the settlement tells you is that the chance of them being found guilty and the size of the settlement were large enough that they were willing to spend 12 million to avoid it, and small enough that Opera was willing to accept only 12 million to give it up.
As to "paying their way out", it was a civil suit, not a criminal trial. "Paying their way out" was what would have happened if they HAD been found at fault. It's a company, its purpose is to make money. Paying a fine IS defeat. It's not like this is a murderer who's getting out of the death penalty by paying his way out.
Hotmail now works in Opera, which it didn't before. Surprise, surprise.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Firstly Opera are a major player in the fast-growing mobile browser sector. They are in partnership with some of the biggest manufacturers, such as Nokia, IBM, Sony Ericsson, Kyocera, Sharp and Psion. Opera's small-screen rendering technology is far more advanced than anything Microsoft have, and they know it. Opera are also a powerful voice on the W3C committee (it was an Opera employee who came up with the idea of CSS) and are committed to web standards.
As well as offering true cross-platform support (LINUX, Mac, Windows, Solaris, OS/2, Symbian) Opera is also far more feature rich than anything Microsoft have. If you think Opera aren't a potential threat to Microsoft then you are incredibly naive.
Thanks for taking the easy way out, Opera. Maybe I'll give Mozilla a try.
$12 million dollars sure seems a lot more like hush money than simple "stop annoying me and go away" money.
For $12 million, if Microsoft were in the right, they'd have squashed Opera.
Innocent until proven guilty is nice, but how long are we going to wait to finally punish them for the things we KNOW they did wrong?
Actually, "innocent until proven guilty" is for criminal trials, not civil suits. It's referred to as the "burden of proof", and it's different for different things. For some stuff, you simply must prove that it is "more likely than not" that the defendent did something wrong. For others, you have to prove it "beyond a reasonable doubt".
As for punishing them for things you "know" they did wrong, the difference is between the things that a judge knows they did wrong, and the things that you "know" they did wrong. I personally consider this a good thing, but if you have a problem with it, you should run for judge. See if enough of your voting peers agree with your fitness to render verdicts.
Having read only the link that you sent me, I personally believe there's a decent chance (say, 40-50%) that Microsoft broke the CSS intentionally. And you only made it up to 40-50% because I was including other experiences, like their having blocked Mozilla. If you treat the evidence on only its own merits, (which a judge should do) then maybe 20-30% chance that Microsoft intentionally broke it. I can definitely envision someone at MSN deciding that Opera is big enough to warrant their own file, then just doing a crappy job with it.
Or put another way, never attribute to malice what is easily explainable by incompetence.
It sounds like it is a competitor, and Microsoft matches that, at least in the mobile market. And who else would be willing to pay just like that to make a problem go away? Who could afford it?
So Opera is getting away just fine. It gets lots of press, and everyone assumes that it's Microsoft, even though, strictly speaking, Opera stuck to the deal and didn't reveal the company.
The rumor that it is Microsoft has not been officially confirmed, but if you put two and two together, MS is the most likely candidate.
Clever signature text goes here.
Your proposal, IMO, would simply deter poor companies/individuals from suing.
$12M is big money for Opera, but small money for M$. So of course M$ will do it again, probably even to Opera. That turns Opera's business model into extortion, and keeps M$ a monopoly.
--
make install -not war
I am sure you, too understand why Microsoft gets crap for making other browsers look bad on purpose. To quote another post of mine:
Your examples aren't quite the same as Microsoft's actions against Opera. Not only is Microsoft serving bad code specifically to Opera, but they are lying about Opera to the press as well.Clever signature text goes here.
I just can't put my finger on what they're up to...
I have two words to answer your question.
Software Patents
A few more words...
Eben Moglen spoke at Harvard in February regarding not just SCO, but the future direction of the IT industry at large.
He said that today the battle is over copyright. In five years the battle will be over software patents. And in ten years the battle will shift to that of bandwidth. Of ensuring that everyone has access to bandwidth as easily as they do electricity, so that all may share in the information that is available.
My dates may be slightly off, but you can see the coming progression of battlefields.
Microsoft engages in illegal and immoral behavior. But they are not stupid. They are preparing for the next war, which will be software patents.
The transcript of Eben Moglen's speech can be viewed here from Groklaw and the video of his speech can be viewed here from Harvard. (Sorry, it's in Real Media format)
If you haven't seen that speech, you should. To call it enlightening is to do it a disservice.
- Neil Wehneman
P.S. I realize I use battle and war imagery a lot in this post, but quite frankly I believe the stakes are that high. Imagine if the printing press revolution had fallen to the entrenched interests of the day. We are now in the same situation, only with digital information.
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Opera. Because friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer. Or Windows. Or anything else that comes from Redmond.
(Did I mention Opera works equally well on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS? It's a great piece of software. That's why I keep paying $40 (or however much it is) to put it on every computer I have, and I install the "free" (ad) version on every computer I set up for my friends and co-workers. And don't say you don't like the million billion toolbars it has. Just turn them all off and you've got a nice clean browser that renders all pages.)
Microsoft is freeing up its legal team for the upcomming patent wars. They don't want their legal team tied up in pointless and counterproductive litigation which does not have the effect of destroying open source.
At one time, it was worth fighting companies like Opera. Bleed their cash. Steal their ideas. Sabatoge their product, etc.
But now, it is much higher priority for the legal team to be ready for the new patent wars.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
And based on the fact that revenues are increasing rapidly, how can you even think about claiming that Opera relies on lawsuits for revenue.
Fact: Opera makes enough money just by selling a browser. Anyone who has followed the company and read a few interviews with the CEO knows that you are talking out of your ass.
Also, this has been discussed before. I guess I shouldn't even mention the fact that Microsoft was spreading lies about Opera through the media, should I?
Man, try to inform yourself before shooting your mouth off like that.
Clever signature text goes here.