Summary: I also thought of calling this episode of our Four Freedoms podcast series "The interesting journey of a company producing proprietary software being involved in an open source project," ... not so catchy. Or maybe "Why business and openness do not have to be enemies." The point is that on February 12, 2013, Opera Software announced that it was dropping its own, proprietary rendering engine in favour of the open source WebKit engine. I wanted to know more about that decision and the consequences going forward. What I discovered is a company with a commitment to open standards, knowledge sharing, liberal licensing, and a long-term history of actions to back those claims up. This podcast is roughly half of a wide-ranging and interesting conversation I had with with Bruce Lawson and Andrea Bovens from Opera Software at the 2013 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This was recorded on February 26, 2013 on the trade show floor. The recording quality suffers somewhat from the background noise of the other 63,000 people who were at the MWC with us. I couldn't get them to be quiet. About my guests Bruce Lawson is in the Developer Relations Department and the Web Standards Department at Opera Software. His elevator pitch: "I evangelise using open standards on the web." Bruce co-wrote the very first book on HTML5 with Remy Sharp: Introducing HTML5, published by New Riders. Contact Bruce at brucel@opera.com. Follow him on Twitter @brucel. Andreas Bovens, with Opera since 2007. QA Engineer, then Web Evangelist. Since 2009, Group Leader Developer Relations, also Web Standards Group and Product Manager for Opera extensions. You can contact Andreas at andreasb@opera.com. Follow him on Twitter @andreasbovens. "The web isn't just a mechanism for looking at pictures of kittens" While we were teasing out the interesting position Opera Software occupies as a proprietary, commercially successful software company that also makes large contributions to web standards, freely licensed online learning materials, and software libraries, Bruce pointed out that the Opera browser, despite being proprietary software, also affects social change and benefits people in developing countries around the world: "I believe that we affect social change using our proprietary engine and will continue to do so with open source. Tens of of millions of Opera users would have no access to the web without [Opera products] because they run on ancient feature phones that are the only things affordable in certain developing economies. The web isn't just a mechanism for looking at pictures of kittens. For many people, the web browser is access to a doctor or medical advice. It is access to the outside world in a closed-off regime. It is a school when you can't afford one. That to me is what we do. That is why I love working for Opera, because we literally bring that about for tens of millions of people every day." Open wins the web The old way people thought things would work was to "win the web" with proprietary formats, markup, and more. Internet Explorer and Netscape tried to do that in the early 2000s by "embracing, extending, and extinguishing" ... There was markup and functionality that was browser-specific, some websites only worked in a specific browser. Opera had to create its own, proprietary rendering engine, called "Presto", "to prove that we could be commercially successful using and evangelizing open web standards." This paved the way for using open source, standards compliant code and being commercially successful at the same time. Though it seems commonplace today – thanks to examples like Firefox, Google and many others beyond the world of web browsers (Red Hat, Acquia, Drupal shops galore) – it was a radical idea at the time. Today we can say 'open wins the web.' "We took the decision that rather than paying engineers to maintain feature parity with other rendering engines," says Bruce, "It seemed to be to us a much better way of using our resources (and to
