Opera Software
Opera Software is a software company specialising in web browsers.
Opera helped lobby against software patents during the campaiging around the EU software patents directive, which they said would "open the floodgates for software patents in Europe".[1] They were present in the European Parliament and contributed a statement to FFII's campaign Economic Majority.[2]
The company's "vision" statement on their website explains:
Opera Software does not believe innovation in the software industry is protected or encouraged by software patents. In particular, we believe interoperability on the Internet should be encouraged, and we actively work to ensure that software patents do not stand in the way of interoperability.[3]
Opera Software ASA does however hold several software-patents in the area of browsers[4], such as a patent on grouping tabs in a tabbed browser environment[5]
External links
Pages quoting Opera representatives
(Some of these pages give quotes without any dates or details about where or when things were said. We should replace them with better documented quotes.)
- http://eupat.ffii.org/archiv/zitate/index.en.html#opera - "the fundamental standards for the Web must continue to be royalty free (RF). Therefore, we do not think W3C should describe procedures for RAND licensing. Doing so would help legitimize software patents which we think are harmful to the development of the Web."
- http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/31431.html
- http://eupat.ffii.org/log/03/demo0914/index.en.html
- Opera's statement supporting FFII's Economic Majority campaign
