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Opera Purchase Rumour Control
We've had several submissions this morning concerning a CoolTechZone article stating that Microsoft has purchased Opera, seemingly confirming the Dvorak article we reported on yesterday. However, roblimo has followed up with Opera and found that to be (so far), less than true. Opera PR person Berit Hanson told Slashdot by phone from Oslo, Norway, that "last week it was Google, this week it's Microsoft." She laughed and added, "If I was working for Microsoft I think I'd know it, but I'm still in Oslo, not Washington, still working for Opera." Which, of course, is not to say it won't happen ... it just hasn't happened yet.
As progster on osnews speculated: "Microsoft wants it for the mobile market and they'll kill the pc version of opera."
If MS needs a new browser, which they don't, it would be FAR more strategic to use Firefox, a la Netscape. Even though they would not own the browser, and they would be returning some features back to the public, they could use new Firefox features to drive sales of their server based products.
There is no money in browsers (just ask Opera), but lots to be made in selling server software.
If nothing else, Opera is getting noticed in a lot more places these days. I wonder how the downloads are going?
Stranger things have happened.
Some years back, Apple was killing its developers trying to get Copeland out of the door. It too was shipping "next year", but they canned it in the end and bought NeXTStep to base their next version on.
Of course, MS always manage to hold to their release schedules, don't they? What's that? They don't?
If the IE7 team pull it off, then it becomes one more potential competitor quashed. If they don't, then it's a good fall back position.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
From using the command 'string' on the opera binary, I can retrieve the names of 82 Qt classes.
/usr/bin/perl -w
/usr/lib/opera/8.51-20051114.5/opera|grep ^_ZN`;
#!
use strict;
my @lines = `strings
foreach (@lines) {
my $line = $_;
if ($line =~ m/_ZN(\d+)/) {
if ($1 > 9) {
print substr($line, 5, $1)."\n";
} else {
print substr($line, 4, $1)."\n";
}
}
}
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
If I ate a mince pie for every end-of-year IT rumour on the net I'd have exploded by now.
The rather feverish interest in this stuff marks a real change. A year ago, it could have been announced that Microsoft had bought a B-52 and ten atomic bombs and everyone would have turned over and gone back to sleep. Now, the merest whiff of action on the Microsoft-Google-Yahoo front has the pundits running.
But I can't help wondering whether a little game of chicken is going on, with folks being bounced into buying something for fear the next guy will get it. Ebay and Skype, Google and AOL - these and others are not really matches made in heaven. It will be interesting to see how the dice have fallen on this craze in, say, a year's time. But I hope MS don't buy Opera, for a simple, selfish reason. I like using Opera, and I like it just the way it is.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Opera uses Qt and is non-open-source, so I'm pretty sure they pay to license it. Then again, I think the same's true of motif. Anyway, the mac version certainly looks like Qt, and it would be a waste not to enable Qt on mac/win if you want it (just like if you really want to use motif on unix, you can.
I am trolling
I think it's because of this Digg "article": Microsoft Buys Out Opera that many people think it's true
This is an incredibly big deal, not because of anything in the story itself, but because of those magic words "followed up by phone". Someone submitted what looked to the Slashdot editors like a really interesting story, but the credibility of which seemed a little flaky. They then *checked the story with a primary source* themselves. (OK, roblimo's working for OSDN rather than Slashdot, IIRC.) But this means that from now on when Slashdot runs a story that turns out to have been trivially falsifiable by a phone call or couple of emails, they can't use the excuse of "we just report what people submit". Fact chgecking... the thin end of a slippery wedge, if you ask me ;)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Microsoft and Google both have their own PR departments, and any purchase of Opera would be targeted at 1) the code, and 2) some of the developers. The rest of the employees would probably not know anything about it. At best, the owners of the company, a major shareholder or two, and possibly a few key people who need to be given an incentive to stick around after the acquisition will be informed. The rest may be kept on board as a gesture of good will or may be let go unceremoniously a few weeks later.
Amazing magic tricks