Linked by Kroc Camen on Fri 18th Sep 2009 18:51 UTC
You all know that I don't particularly like Opera. I find the product to be lacking polish, over-complicated and without the marketing pizazz that has made Firefox a household name. That's just my personal opinion, and that opinion has garnered many complaints of unjustness. To that end, to present a fairer discussion I would like to put a simple question to the community: "What should Opera do?".
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RE[7]: Opera's Browser Is Irrelevant
by wumip on Mon 21st Sep 2009 17:32
in reply to "RE[6]: Opera's Browser Is Irrelevant"
Member since:2009-08-20
[q]They need to increase their usage and that's what the article is asking.[/quote]
They are increasing their usage. Their desktop user base grew by 65% in a year (Q2 2008 to Q2 2009), and their market share in Europe is approaching 10% (more than Chrome and Safar combined).
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Member since:
2005-07-06
They need to increase their usage and that's what the article is asking. It's like saying that Firefox shouldn't have bothered because Windows had IE and that it shouldn't be installed on open source platforms because they're irrelevant. It has all added up. You're painting over the fact that there are reasons why virtually no one uses Opera. Arguing that the 'potential is there' is irrelevant.
No they weren't actually. The KDE integration came from an individual contributor who then went to work for Novell and Novell contributed Excel VB improvements as well as having a go-oo rebuild and working on a lot of optimisations. That's why you have open source software. The fact that they are sponsored for their work, or that an individual comes in and then gets sponsored, is totally irrelevant.
I really don't know how we got to talking about Open Office exclusively, but you've been proved wrong by a multitude of open source projects. You're also very confused about what it is that you're arguing. There are many sponsored developers working on the Linux kernel for example, but they don't all say that open sourcing something is irrelevant because they all share the work load. That's the point. Completely independent and volunteer developers are fewer, but they're the ones who tend to come in with the groundbreaking ideas.
Arguing about 'volunteer' programmers is irrelevant to your initial argument that open sourcing Opera would be a waste of time. This then turned into some argument against open source software itself.
The only correlation that matters is that when Open Office was open sourced the improvements users cared about came thick and fast. You also have a very strange view of software sales.
It wasn't made better when it was closed source and it started to become irrelevant because of that. How you expect people to pay for that regardless I don't know.
Open Office improvements increased dramatically when it was open sourced. Take it or leave it.