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Comment by suyash | Hacker News Reader

It's ironic that both the companies which are proponet of non-profit open source software are engaged in this battle. Opera's legal counsel need to reassess this case, I don't think they can get $3.4million from this guy, what is the point of going after him?

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Opera has been for profit and proprietary from the get go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_%28web_browser%29

edit: here is a good excerpt

"Up to this point, the Opera browser was trialware and had to be purchased after the trial period ended. But version 5.0 (released in 2000) saw the end of the trial period requirement. Instead, Opera became ad-sponsored, displaying advertisements to users without a license,[8] which was commonly criticized as a barrier to gaining market share. In newer versions, the user was allowed a choice of generic graphical banners or text-based targeted advertisements provided by Google based upon the page being viewed."

AFAIK, Opera is in no way a proponent of non-profit or open source software. They are a publicly traded for-profit company and their main product is proprietary.

Ok, thanks for the correction.

Except that Opera has historically been one of the most significant proponents for open standards, the WHATWG, and opening the web to people without internet access. One should also not forget that Opera is now contributing, and have already landed several patches, to the Chromium and Blink projects.

Yes, but that's certainly a great position to take for a small for-profit selling a proprietary product designed to interpret content primarily written for other software.

Corel probably would have been thrilled to have Adobe make their formats completely open and "standardized" back in the day to reduce the friction of switching products.

Open Source vs Open Standards are two very different positions

Open source you want? Here you go https://github.com/operasoftware/dragonfly

I'm just hoping that the suit doesn't extend its tentacles to either Mozilla's product(s) or its finances.

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