Tips and tricks to keep opera 12.xx relavent?

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

Presto is not open source (I think). So Opera could decide to develop it again (and leushino says no way). They could still make it open source (good public relations to their longtime loyal power users, but perhaps they wouldn't want to give away something for nothing) or they could sell it. Would anyone want to buy it? The issue is one of market. Now if a good number of the features of Opera Presto are picked up via Opera blink (through extensions or otherwise), there'd be no interest in that. But if this doesn't happen, then the issue is market. How many power users are there? It would be interesting to hear comments on whether Opera might be inclined (for its longtime loyal power users) to make it open source, or whether there could be a market to sell it to a third party.

Indeed, Presto is not open source. Opera owns it and the rights to it; moreover, Opera has licensed Presto to a some other companies for use in other products, and those continue to return license revenue to Opera. Such licenses probably limit what Opera can do with Presto in terms of making it public to the licensee's competitors. If only for those reasons, it's extremely unlikely for Opera to release Presto into the public domain. However, an even greater reason looms: why would a company establish free access to code it spent years and mega-dollars to develop if the only likely result of that was to assist other development houses to use it to compete with Opera?

After all these years, Microsoft has never released DOS into the public domain, nor is it ever likely to. Its reasons in many cases run parallel to those of Opera. The reality is that Opera is the only company that legally can release a Presto-based browser, but Opera has decided to go a different direction with Blink - just as Microsoft has chosen to go a different direction from DOS with its newer OSs, but it still doesn't make DOS open source. Don't hold your breath waiting for another web browser based on Presto.