Opera claims ex-employee took trade secrets to Mozilla, sues him for $3.4M

Opera gets in bed with Google Chrome and then sues the other camp? I thought they were above all this.<p>Either way, an idea for a browser feature is hardly a huge industrial secret - Webkit, Blink and Gecko have near-parity on features, and are competing more on speed. How would this stand up in court?<p>Neither Google nor Opera have anything to gain from this - what could be the economic rationale?

Hard to say anything without hard details, but in Europe this stuff can be hard to make stick.<p>Also this kind of actioning is distrubing from a company like opera.<p>Death throes?

Interesting that the claim is "took trade secrets to Mozilla" when apparently Mozilla wants to have nothing to do with that Junior prototype.

Their lawsuit claims that "Opera Software ASA is an innovative company which has developed software and technology which have proved to be successful internationally".<p>The article talks about features which aren't really IP. Perhaps their trade-secrets relate to coding and construction methods that make their product superior, but these really can't be protected unless they're so esoteric that no one would logically come up with them independently.<p>So they sue a non-profit to stifle competition in their industry ... show me more innovation (and market-share) than Mozilla and then maybe I'll believe you're the innovator.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire</a> Surely work for hire applies?

Guess it's time to stop using Opera

Was the trade secret "switch to webkit"?

Definitely read that as "Oprah" and was very confused.