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."

Comments

Re:Free as in beer

[killmenow]

Geesh, I was just going to do some moderating; but, I have to respond.

There are several replies to this post with the "wah! typical /. wah! why are you so critical wah! they're a commercial company wah! get over yourself ... WAH! WAH! WAH!"

Look, nowhere in this post did he bitch about Opera. He said he desires to keep using as much "really free" software as possible... and simply, "thanks but no thanks" and frankly never did he say Opera sucks or FSCK Opera! He never even suggested they should open source their product.

Listen, I loved the Opera browser. I'm sure it's still wonderful. But it is precisely this reason that I no longer use it.

I bought and paid for Opera. I even asked my wife for a new license for Christmas a few years back...and she got it for me. I was a huge Opera fanboy. Whenever some story about browsers came up on /. I'd be one of the first saying, "Hey, you should use Opera. It's sweet!" and such.

But, at some point I realized that as cool as Opera is, and as much as I think the company is a fine company, it's still not software that is terribly concerned with freedom. And there are two perfectly acceptable (if not arguably better in some ways) browsers that are. Opera wants to give gratis licenses to schools, good on them. But any school that takes that gift should look at it for what it is and weigh carefully their options. Firefox is a damn fine browser on par with Opera in most ways that the majority of their users would need...and it's not just gratis, it's free. If Opera goes under, what then?

To me, Opera and Mozilla/Firefox...it's like six of one, half-a-dozen of another. And functionality (for my concern) being equal, I choose to use Mozilla/Firefox now. Because they're free, not because they're gratis. And I want to support this.

I find it amazing somebody points out that he makes the same choice on slashdot (of all places) and not only gets flack about it but gets modded down for it.

Anomaly...does not compute.

Maybe you're different from the rest of the world.

[Kjella]

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

Re:Open beer

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.

Has everyone here lost all perspective?

[cgenman]

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.

Re:What advantages does Opera have over Firefox?

[TheRaven64]

I haven't used FireFox much, so I don't know how many of these features it misses, but here are a few of the things I liked about Opera:

• 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.