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Opera Offers Free Licenses For Educational Use
Opera Watch writes "Opera Software today announced that it would offer free licenses to higher education institutions. This is a change from the previous cost of $1000 (US) for unlimited licenses. It remains to be seen, however, whether Opera will allow schools to give standard Opera licenses to students to use on personal computers/laptops within campus at no additional cost, that came with the $1000 license fee. This comes after a respected university advised its students not to use Internet Explorer, for its lack of security. Opera Software said they are doing so in an effort to meet the student and university need for security on the Internet."
GNU defines free software:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0)
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2)
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this
The only sticky part is the licensing of free software - total freedom would allow me to fork the source for profit yet that would then restrict the freedom of others in using said free software thus making the software not free anymore. So to remain free I cant do certain things to software restricting my own freedom.
As for Opera thanks but no thanks I have the desire to keep using as much really free software as possible promoting further development.
Great, now I won't have to pay for FireFox. Oh wait, nevermind....
I think it's funny that the developers are now going to beat IE with the same tactic that MS used to get market share for IE... free browser.
;)
Of course this one it a bit more secure.
Here I come to save the da... *thud*
I gotta get me a shorter cape.
I really thought Firefox was perfect after switching from IE sometime ago around the mid-Firebird stage. Loved it and with addons such as Gmail Inbox in the taskbar and Adblock it's obviously great, but it still has some major stability issues. Regardless of OS or computer I've used it on sometimes it'll just crash for no reason (kinda like gaim) and it's simply annoying when you have 10 tabs open and have to go to each again.
At very least it should remember the tabs you had opened (is there an extension for this?) while they get their shit together, I'm thinking of giving Opera another serious go, as long as it's more stable then it can easily win me over, I don't mind seeing the ad and if it's good I'll pay for it, I just want a browser I can *trust*.
Opera does everything i want without me having to find extensions
Firefox doesnt
though im probably in the small minority that doesnt even notice the add in the top right at all unless i specificaly look at it
They must feel the pressure of Firefox...
They should have made the program free for everyone and look elsewhere for sources of income. Firefox is gaining market share at a steady pace and if Opera doesn't act now, they'll be out of the game.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Actully, what does Firefox do better than Opera? Yeah, ads or paying for software is not as nice as free, speech or beer, but what makes you think Firefox is better? As far as I can tell, all Firefox does is implement the good ideas that Opera develops. So why not reward the guys for their good work?
Opera Software said they are doing so in an effort to meet the student and university need for security on the Internet.
Gerv
Now they have made some inroads in the embedded market, but it looks like the Mozilla team has their sites set on this as well. My prediction is the same will apply (why pay when you can get it for free), except the gap between Opera and Mozilla has closed significantly.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
It's be best for Opera to allow schools to distribute it to their students. It's very possible that Universities may start forbidding IE usage, and if Opera's available to the students too, they may just get lifelong users. After all you get used to a program after 4+ years of use.
A little bit desperate maybe but a good move overall. Opera is a good browser but I'm not likely to pay money for it on my desktop. On my handheld however, I would be lost without it. Opera really shines in the embedded market and I suspect they make most of their money from this, if they don't now I'm sure that is the direction they are going. I wish them luck.
I plan to stick with firefox on my desktop for now but I bet my next phone/palm has Opera on it.
I don't think, Therefore I'm not.
Now I'm not saying Firefox isn't a terrific browser (because it is), but when someone suggests a browser that isn't IE or Firefox, why is there an uproar? You may think Honda (Firefox) makes the best vehicle, but does that mean Toyota (Opera) vehicles shouldn't be on the road?
Keeping with that analogy, the oil burning, cloud spewing, Gremlin with brakes that don't work (IE), *should* be off the road.
Earn a free iRiver
So 'we' say Opera, FF etc are all secure and IE isn't. How true is this? I'm seriously asking, not trying to flame.
It seems to me that some are defining 'secure' as 'doesn't have the same security issues as IE'. IE is the biggest browser and obviously should be the target of a hackers energy, but is there anyway of putting a finger on the exploits that will come when Opera, FF etc are big enough to warrent hacker time?
Is there a way to evaluate this? It seems like simply something you have to wait and see. That the security is only available to the minority, by partial fact that it is the minority.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I like Firefox, too. Firefox is an easier transition for IE users, since the interface is very similar, and on the whole it plays nicer with sites which are very IE-specific. Opera is very standards compliant, but doesn't try as hard to play nice with those who aren't.
Opera's multiple document interface is better, IMHO. It's also more featureful out of the box (I know firefox has a gazillion extensions available, many of them damn fine, but you have to go get them).
Opera has also (allegedly, I don't use it this way) taken substantial time to make it customizeable and manageable in an enterprise sense. I think it would be easier to roll out Opera to 150 machines than to roll out Firefox with the same capabilities (i.e. lots of extensions) to the same machines.
Firefox is truly FREE, Opera just doesn't have a cost for use, but for most users (the unwashed masses who care not at all about F/OSS) it doesn't matter.
Now, if Sunbird works out...
More than mere navel gazing.
I used to be heavy Opera user. Now I'm exclusively FF user. Not 100% happy with both. You've heard about their selling points, here's what pisses _me_ off (BTW - I use either a dialup line or traffic limited b/b line. If you have a fat free pipe you may not care about this):
Opera:
1) No option to ban loading images from third party sites. (In FF it's "Load Images.. for originating sites only").
2) No option to "Block images from this site".
3) Some versions are more buggy than others. A bit of a checkered pattern.
4) I miss history for forms. I like when I can type a couple of letters on Google search and search again for that stuff in FF.
5) I dunno, v8 kinda fixes it but I can't help feeling that the rendered page feels somewhat watered down or something. Can't explain it better.
FF:
1) Image-less browsing is rudimentary and is a PITA. Please - can I have a button on taskbar to toggle - "show all images / show cached images / no images" like in Opera! Also - when I right click on an image to show it - feel free to show it inline. Also - don't ignore the (known) image size for image placeholders.
2) Since 1.0pr(?) this "You need a plugin" popup bar SO pisses me off! NO! I won't fucking install Flash!!! Shove your ads....
3) Back button is slow sometimes.
4) Tabbed browsing / MDI does not hold a candle to Opera. I tried TabBrowser Extensions but they help only so-so. And they are buggy.
5) It loses a cache all too often. With "modern" pages having hundreds of kb's of images it's an annoyance sometimes. Not to say that offline browsing suffers.
Both:
1) I _SO_ crave for an option to disable iframes "from other sites". Combined with image blocking it would've killed stupid ads dead.
2) Option to save a web page with images and CSS to a single MIME file is a killer feature (in MSIE, gah) when you need to have something after doing your web research. A matter of convenience of course but imagine that Linux kernel would've been distributed as a set of *.c.bz2 files.
Stereotypical-A conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image.
Prototypical-An original type, form, or instance serving as a basis or standard for later stages.
For personal preference I use Konqueror, but I have yet to see an opera-beating browser on windows, even with the ads.
I am trolling
Wow. This is flamebait? Who knew? Why doesn't Malda just admit that handing out moderation privileges to everyone who bothers to register a nickname was a poorly thought out idea and doesn't encourage rational discussion. It's more of a burden, really.
Sleep is futile.
As for Opera thanks but no thanks I have the desire to keep using as much really free software as possible promoting further development.
...but I use GNU/free software when it empowers me. Having GIMP empowers me to make a choice about buying Photoshop. But if you can't use software because it's not GNU/free, then you're not freed - you're enslaved to only use the software people are willing to give away for GNU/free.
I'm not going to force myself to use inferior software (not claiming that this is the case here) for no reason. To me, Opera delivers a better product. So other products are OSS. But if that can't deliver, does it matter? No. If you want to preach to anyone but the fanatics, you have to show that this leads to better qualities. Faster. More stable. More secure. More standards-compliant. Great extensions. More flexible.
If the can't argue price (or TCO), you can't argue features, if you can't argue quality, if all you have is that it is GNU/free, noone cares. RMS can preach all he wants. People don't use OSS software because it is OSS, they use it because it is better. Perhaps that's the OSS process, perhaps it's just a bunch of brillant people who could have done the same with a commercial product. But if you can't deliver, it's a dud either way.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well, I'll leave it to the Opera zealots to post lists of features, but i'll give only one reason.
It has the most responsive UI I have seen in a graphical program. It's the vi of browsers; tremendously powerful, yet small and nimble. And its a class apart on under-specced machines - Firefox doesnt even compare.
I have used the latest versions of firefox, Maxthon etc.. I'm not switching from Opera.
As a long-time Opera user, I'll just point out that half the features that people rave about in Firefox were Opera innovations.
Like it or not, Opera is a great piece of software and it's helped to make Firefox a great piece of software. Had Opera the company been litiguous in nature, they could easily have stamped down on some of those borrowed features, but Opera is one of the good guys and, if I remember correctly, opposed to software patents, etc.
Yet you still choose to paint a picture of Opera that's negative with your talk of whip hands, etc. Well, newsflash for you buddy: they good people at Opera still have to put food on their own tables and roofs above their heads so I and others will continue to appreciate the hard work they put into what many people regard as the best browser (with in-built mail client, RSS reader, etc) available by putting our money where our mouths are.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Is too. For example, Opera 7+ supports CSS3 Media Queries. Firefox doesn't. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.^-^
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Has everybody on Slashdot lost all perspective on how much of the software out there gets made? Some guy in a basement somewhere, usually Norway or Denmark, starts coding up something. Other people respond to the idea, and encourage them. They polish it and release it as shareware, which people decry as buggy junk. They then get more people, polish it up as much as they can, and the public starts to respond. They get more funding, hire more people, and repeat until you have a nice little independent company owned by a coder with an idea and lots of work ethic.
The people work on the software full-time because they don't have to have a primary job. Working on the software is their job. And isn't that what most people want to do?
I see a ton posts here about "F*ck them, they should have made it Open Source and looked for other ways to make money." What would be the point of that? That's saying they should have given up on the browser and done something else. They're doing something nobody thought possible: Surviving selling an independent browser in a hotly contested market. They're an independent company taking on a behemoth on their terms and shaking things up in the process. Give up on the fanboyisms and get a little perspective on what they've done.
I hate to break your illusions, but a lot of the development effort (and all of the full-time coders) for the Mozilla / Firefox rendering effort has been funded by large non-free software corporations. GASP Oh the horrors!
I'm not saying that free software is good or bad or dead. But I am saying that the software ecosystem is a lot more complicated than the pundits here are making it out to be. Stop taking such a simplistic view of things, it makes it harder for me to convince people that the OSS movement isn't a bunch of raving loonies. I had to live with an Access database for several months last time that happened.
The ______ Agenda
BULLSHIT!
I love open source, use it, enjoy it, support it (take time out of busy day to report firefox bugs, and donated money) and I cheer RMS on and on....
But your little quote is bullshit. I think what they are doing is great. Free = don't pay $ so yes, it IS free.
If Mercedes gave you a car for free, but said "don't open the engine hood at all, otherwise drive the car as much as you want" would you turn the car down and say the car isn't free?
Free software does NOT have to come with enough rights that you can do what you want with the code. Is that ideal? Yes. Is that a better thing? Yes. But don't bash companies for giving things away for free like this, that's crazy.
You probrably also think IBM allowing open source programmers use 500+ patents is a bad thing, since it's less than %1 of their patent portfolio. WTF?!?! It's a start, and a great one, and when MS wants to patent FAT to lock everyone out, the IBM move is nothing short of fantastic.
Don't take pictures of RMS playing his flute in front of a butterfly picture too literal. The world does not work that way. There are levels of free, levels of good or bad, not everything is black and white. I see the move Opera is making as nothing short of fantastic.
- The ability to toggle image display with a single button.
- The option to switch to your own/no CSS with a single button press (including some nice options, such as one that shows structural tags). Very nice with sites with ugly CSS.
- Much better IE compatibility than any other browser I've used.
- Mouse gestures. I know they are available as a FireFox extension, but last time I checked this didn't support my favourite one: right-drag down on a link opens the link in a new tab.
- It's tiny. Really. Around 3MB for a full featured browser and mail client.
- Easy to change User Agent string for those sites that work fine in Opera but redirect you to a `You need IE' page anyway.
- Rembers open windows / tabs on exit, so you can restart browsing at exactly the same point.
- Tabs can be re-ordered by dragging them around the tab-bar (I don't know if FireFox does this, but it's a feature I really miss in Safari).
I'm sure there were several others.I am TheRaven on Soylent News