3 ms·

They could open source their older Opera 12 (presto) and Opera Mail, just before they sell the company.

• hollerith 11y ago
  -- and get sued for negotiating in bad faith.
  • frik 11y ago
    Before the negotiation. The old code is death weight anyway and not used in Opera 15 at all. But the code could be useful, to revive Opera Mail and a community could form around their beloved older Opera 1-12 browser.
    • hollerith 11y ago
      Opera's main competitors are open-source projects. You are suggesting that they create another competitor right before putting the company up for sale, and I'm suggesting that they are unlikely to do that. Yes, a different for-profit company did create an open-source browser project, but that was a rare situation in which the for-profit company dominated a very lucrative market (search) and the open-source project had the effect of undermining one of the few strategic advantages (namely, Internet Explorer's usage share) enjoyed by their only serious competitor. In other words, in certain situations it might make sense for a for-profit company to use an open-source project to take users away from a proprietary software product of one of its competitors if the competitor would have been able to use its control over the proprietary software product as a lever on consumer behavior in a huge and lucrative market. But those situations are rare and do not apply here. Google's open-sourcing Chromium resembles Russia's "scorched-earth policy": the move destroyed some of Google's options or resources, but made sense because it simultaneously took those resources away from Google's biggest threat. But the circumstances in which a scorched-earth policy make sense are rare and do not apply in Opera's situation.
    • gsnedders 11y ago
      It may be dead weight, but there's still Opera Mini with its hundreds of millions of users, and then there's plenty of embedded products using it which will never move to the Chromium Content API (because, hey, they're last year's model!).