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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.
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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.
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!
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No, that's a different thing entirely. Windows Update uses ActiveX controls to work out what you need and those are only compatible with IE, as I'm sure you know. There's no legal precident saying they must rewrite code if another browser doesn't support it.
What they did to Opera was deliberately send broken code in order to make it appear that the browser was faulty. The code sent to IE worked fine in Opera but MS went out of their way to alter that code when sending it to Opera. If you went to MSN using a IE5 browser agent string in Opera it would've worked fine. If you went to Windows Update using that same browser agent string in Mozilla you wouldn't get an error but I very much doubt that the site would work.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.