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+<p>Free and open source software enables the world as we know it. From web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining your Facebook feed, nearly every computer system you interact with runs, at least in part, on free software. Free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and enabled the <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/ibm-buys-red-hat-with-eye-on-cloud-dominance/">largest software acquisition</a> in the history of the world.</p>
+<p>Free software is a gift. It’s the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It’s an astounding gift to give. So astounding in fact that it made businesses unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. They weren’t unwilling to use free software, it was too radical and by extension, too political. It had to be renamed “open source.”</p>
+<p>Once that happened open source software took over the world.</p>
+<p>Recently though there’s been a disturbance in the open source force.</p>
+<p>Redis Labs, MongoDB, and Confluent all changed their software licenses in recent months, moving away from open source licenses to more restrictive terms that limit what can be done with the software, making it no longer open source software.</p>
+<p>The problem, argue Redis Labs, MongoDB and others, is hosted software services. Also known as, “the cloud.” Also known as Amazon AWS.</p>
+<p>Amazon, for it’s part, recently came out swinging, releasing its own version of the code behind Elastic Search in response to licensing changes at Elastic. Interestingly, Elastic, the company behind Elastic Search, has a very different response from that of MongoDB and Redis – it hasn’t said a word in protest.</p>
+<h2 id="cloud-burst">Cloud Burst</h2>
+<p>MongoDB the company is built around the open source “NoSQL” database of the same name. MongoDB’s database is useful for storing unstructured data, for example images, which it can handle just as well as it handles more traditional data types. Data is stored in JSON-like documents rather than the columns and rows of a relational database. Since there’s no structured tables there’s no “structured query language” for working with the data, hence the term “NoSQL.”</p>
+<p>MongoDB is not the only NoSQL database out there, but it’s one of the most widely used. According to industry aggregator, DB Engines, MongoDB is the <a href="https://db-engines.com/en/ranking">fifth most popular database</a>, with everyone from Google to Code Academy to Foursquare using MongoDB.</p>
+<p>MongoDB is also leading the charge to create a new kind of open source license, which CTO Eliot Horowitz believes is necessary to protect open source software businesses as computing moves into the new world of the cloud.</p>
+<p>The cloud, argue Horowitz and others, requires the open source community to re-think and possibly update open source licenses to “deal with new challenges in a new environment.” The challenges are, essentially, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, which are all capable of taking open source software, wrapping it up as a service and reselling it. The problem with AWS or Azure wrapping up MongoDB and offering it as part of a software as a service (SaaS), is that it then competes with MongoDB’s own cloud-based SaaS – MongoDB Atlas. What’s threatened then is not MongoDB’s source code, but MongoDB’s own SaaS derived from that source code, and which is the company’s chief source of revenue.</p>
+<p>To combat the potential threat to its bottom line, MongoDB has moved from the Gnu Public License (GPL) to what it calls the Server Side Public License, or SSPL. The SSPL says, in essence, you can do anything you want with this software, except use it to build something that competes with MongoDB Atlas.</p>
+<p>Originally MongoDB submitted the SSPL to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the organization that oversees and approves new open source licenses, but after seeing the writing on the wall – discussion on the OSI mailing lists, combined with the wording of the license made it unlikely the SSPL would ever be approved by the OSI – MongoDB has withdrawn the SSPL from consideration.</p>
+<p>The SSPL is not an open source license and it never will be.</p>
+<p>To understand why it helps to realize that MongoDB is not the first open source business to run into this situation. In fact, part of this problem – companies taking software, using it as they please and contributing nothing back – is the reason open source software exists at all.</p>
+<p>Open source licenses vary, but the gist is generally, you can take this code and do what you want with it, but you can’t make the code proprietary, and if you use it in another project, then that project can’t be proprietary either. These licenses were written this way to prevent companies from taking open source code, using it in their own code and not sharing any of it back to the original project.</p>
+<p>Horowitz argues that wrapping a piece of code in a SaaS offering is the modern equivalent of using it in an application.</p>
+<p>It is a novel argument, but it’s in defense of a very old problem that goes well beyond licensing. It’s a problem that goes all the back to the beginning of free software – how do you make money off software if you give it away for free?</p>
+<p>One traditional answer has been that you sell services around your open source software. But for Horowitz that’s not good enough. “Monetizing open source with support contracts has never been a great business model,” he tells Ars. Red Hat would likely disagree, but Horowitz believes that more protective licenses would bring more venture capital investment and spawn more software businesses based on the open model MongoDB has used. “We’re unique,” he says, “I want us to be less unique.”</p>
+<p>He may be correct. A more protective license could induce more venture capital investment because there’s (arguably) a greater likelihood of return on their investment. But if that capital did come, it wouldn’t be investing in open source because that kind of restriction on the software means it no longer fits the definition of open source.</p>
+<p>Quite a few open source advocates have already made the counter argument that the current set of licenses are fine, it’s the business models that need work.</p>
+<p>Bruce Perens, co-author of the original <a href="https://opensource.org/docs/osd">open source definition</a>, says the SSPL is incompatible with the OSI’s open source definition number nine, which says that the “license must not restrict other software.” Since the SSPL forces any SaaS software that is aggregated with the covered software, but not a derivative of it, to nevertheless be open source, it fails this test. “I wrote number nine into the OSD to prohibit exactly this sort of conduct,” says Perens, “the text is really clear.”</p>
+<p>But MongoDB is not the only one complaining that the cloud is raining on its profits.</p>
+<p>Redis Labs, another data storage company, was the first to sound the alarm about cloud providers threatening its business and Redis Labs may have the better solution. Redis Labs initially changed its license to include something called the Common Clause sub-license, which forbids anyone from selling any software it covers. Software licensed with the Common Clause is not, by anyone’s definition, open source, which Redis Labs acknowledged. It has never described those portions of its software as open source.</p>
+<p>As this article was wrapping up Redis Labs made yet another licensing change, in essence dropping all pretense of being open source software and adopting a homegrown proprietary license for some of its modules. To be clear, most of Redis is governed by the Apache 2.0 License, but some modules are not, namely RedisJSON, RedisSearch, RedisGraph, RedisML and RedisBloom.</p>
+<p>The license Redis Labs applies to these modules says that while users can view and modify the code, use it in their applications, it restricts which types of applications they can build. With Redis Labs’ new license you are not free to build anything you want. You cannot build database products, a caching engine, a processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or any kinds of ML or AI derived serving engine. You cannot in other words use Redis Labs’ code to compete with Redis Labs. This violates one of the core tenants of open source licensing – that there be no restrictions on derivative software.</p>
+<p>Unfortunately for both companies it doesn’t make sense to simultaneously say that you are open source, and that only you should profit from your open source software. There <em>is</em> a business model where than does make sense: proprietary software.</p>
+<p>That’s a path that Elastic.co has hewed for some time. While part of the problem here is that there is no playbook set in stone yet, some companies has managed to prosper with both open source and proprietary code. Elastic, makers of Elasticsearch and other open source tools, has faced the exact competition from AWS and soldiered on.</p>
+<p>Not only has Amazon for years offered Elasticsearch on AWS (ostensibly competing with Elastic’s own offerings), Amazon recently packaged up its own version of the Elasticsearch codebase, extending it to offer for free several of the services Elastic hasn’t released as open source. Elastic’s response has been little more than the corporate equivalent of a shrug.</p>
+<h2 id="lessons-from-history">Lessons from history</h2>
+<p>Why does MongoDB want to be open source at all? After all there is no shortage of very successful proprietary software, so why not embrace that path and move on?</p>
+<p>Horowitz tells me he believes “that open source results in better systems software, especially databases,” going on to cite security and community as advantages of remaining open source. He’s right about both of those things, those are often cited as reasons to use open source software – more eyes on the software means fewer bugs, better security.</p>
+<p>But looking at the open source definition, it’s clear that Horowitz is missing one key component that’s built into to every open source license – generosity.</p>
+<p>Open source does not limit what you can do with the software, ever. Full stop. This may well be the chief reason for its success, it’s certainly what made it palpable to large businesses in the first place.</p>
+<p>Generosity of this kind is how you get community, the cornerstone on which any successful open source project is built. By allowing the widest possible range of users to use your software you get the biggest possible community. More eyes on bugs, more people fixing them. That community is what turns into momentum. That momentum becomes market share. Sometimes market share becomes profit, but that’s not a promise of open source.</p>
+<p>As Bruce Perens puts it, “we have to draw a line between open source… and the right to make money with open source. The open source definition allows, but does not support, your right to make money. We’re not going to change the rules because you can make money better that way.”</p>
+<p>To its credit, Horowitz and MongoDB seem to have come around to this point for view, or at least accepted the inevitability of it when they withdrew the SSPL from consideration as an OSI-approved license.</p>
+<p>Just because you build it and they come, does not mean massive profit.</p>
+<p>In fact, if you build it and they come and then you take it away, it might be worse than if you’d never built it.</p>
+<p>Redis Labs’ move away from open source comes after it reaped all the benefits of open source – community support, wide adoption and code contributions from a widespread sources. To put it bluntly, Redis Labs angered the community.</p>
+<p>When free software developers get mad, they get forking, and there is indeed a fork of Redis, <a href="https://goodformcode.com/">GoodFORM</a>. GoodFORM takes the re-licensed Redis modules as they were prior to the license change, and will maintain them for Debian, Fedora and other Linux distros that cannot ship proprietary software.</p>
+<p>The unintended consequence of Redis Labs’ new license is that anyone wanting to use a full and open source version of Redis will have to use GoodFORM, not Redis.</p>
+<p>Individual developers might not much care, but large companies looking to use open source software aren’t so cavalier. For them it usually comes down to a choice, either use clearly open source software with an OSI approved license, or call the lawyers. And no one ever wants to call the lawyers just to install a piece of software.</p>
+<p>Perens tells Ars that this was one of the key motivations behind the intimal open source definition (originally written for the Debian project). “The open source definition means that you shouldn’t need a lawyer just to be a user,” says Perns. “And one of the ways we do that is minimizing the legal load.”</p>
+<p>Redis Labs’ new license puts companies in the position of needing a lawyer, and GoodFORM becomes the more logical choice. This also may hint at why MongoDB wanted to remain open source.</p>
+<p>Other open source projects which have changed to closed source licenses have not fared well. The Xfree86 project was the defacto standard for running X Windows for most of the 1990s, up through the early 2000s. In 2004 Xfree86 began shipping code that the Free Software Foundation felt was counter to the GPL. The downstream operating systems using Xfree86 decided that was unacceptable and a fork, X.org, was born. Today X.org occupies the place Xfree86 once did and Xfree86 is abandoned.</p>
+<p>Other examples are easy to find, LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice, MariaDB came out of license changes in MySQL, Wireshark came out of Ethereal, the list goes on, but the key thing to note is not just that the forks happened, but that they took with them the developers, the community, the momentum that sustains open source software over the long haul. Lose the goodwill of the open source community and it can be vicious in exacting its revenge. It’s also efficient in doing so, Xfree86 was effectively dead six months after X.org began, OpenOffice disappeared into irrelevancy similarly quickly.</p>
+<p>The overwhelming lesson of open source history is that once you are open source, it’s very unlikely you will change that and survive.</p>
+<h2 id="what-makes-open-source-work-generosity">What makes open source work: generosity</h2>
+<p>If open source history teaches that there is no going back, it’s worth considering why.</p>
+<p><a href="https://beansbooks.com/opencode">Beanbooks</a>, a little project spun out of Linux computer manufacturer System76 is a perfect example of what Perens sees as an ideal open source software scenario. In <cite><a href="https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1470/1385">The emerging economic paradigm of Open Source</a></cite> Perens argues that a company’s non-differentiating software is its best scenario for open source software. That is, open source the infrastructure of the business, not the core.</p>
+<p>To put it another way, Beanbooks was not System76’s profit center, but it is an enabling technology for System76’s profit center – building Linux-based computers.</p>
+<p>However, despite being a perfect candidate for an open source license, Beanbooks is not open source. Why?</p>
+<p>System76 sells a hosted version of Beanbooks, a SaaS, and at the time the company was worried that a larger company would come along, take the GPL code, essentially clone Beanbooks and get all the profit from System76’s investment.</p>
+<p>System76 founder Carl Richell says he can empathize with MongoDB and Redis Labs, but he has already been down the worry-about-someone-stealing-your-code-for-competing-SaaS road and regrets it. “Our concern was that someone would wrap up the software and we would lose all our investment.” He says System76 wanted something like patent protection for a few years, but that “ended up hurting us, hurting the platform, and we shouldn’t have had those concerns.”</p>
+<p>While the SaaS version of Beanbooks looks to be fine, the available code does not get updates and is, from a free software perspective, fairly useless. The Github page is a ghost town. There’s no development, no community.</p>
+<p>Beanbooks the service carries on, but it does so without a community contributing ideas, code and everything else vibrant open source projects have. Richell thinks Beanbooks might have avoided its fate if it had a GPL or similar license from the beginning.</p>
+<p>“If it was good enough that someone wanted it that’s great,” says Richell. The key to success for Ritchell isn’t the open source software, it’s the innovation. “Differentiation is not what you’ve done today, but how rapidly you can advance,” he says. As the software developer you have a head start, and, hopefully, a vision of where you are going, those are your differentiators, to use Perens’ terms.</p>
+<p>“The only way to be successful is to stay ahead,” says Richell, “I don’t think the license has anything to do with it.”</p>
+<p>The Chef project, makers of various software automation and deployment tools, seems to agree and offers an alternative course to that of MongoDB and Redis. Chef recently announced it would change its license to be completely open source (under the Apache 2.0 license). “We welcome anyone to use and extend our software for any purpose in alignment with the four essential freedoms of Free Software,” writes Chef CEO Barry Crist. While Crist doesn’t mention any other companies, it’s hard to see the specific language of “the four essential freedoms” as anything but a response to Redis and MongoDB.</p>
+<h2 id="what-the-future-looks-like">What the future looks like</h2>
+<p>Everyone loves an underdog, and Redis Labs and MongoDB want to portray themselves as the open source underdogs waging a heroic battle against the forces of evil in the form of AWS. But are they?</p>
+<p>Redis Labs and MongoDB both look like very healthy companies. Redis Labs recently raised $60 million dollars in funding and, based on the companies doing the funding, looks poised for a successful IPO. MongoDB’s IPO last year was, by all accounts, a huge success. It’s stock IPOed at $24 and has steadily climbed ever since then. Today it trades at at around $100 a share. Just before this article went to press one of MongoDB’s biggest users, Lyft, did defect to Amazon, but after a slight stock drop, MongoDB’s stock was right back up where it was before Lyft defected.</p>
+<p>Neither company is hurting. At least not yet. The fallout from their license changes remains to be seen, but given that much of the development of MongoDB comes from employees, it will likely be fine regardless of whether it’s open source or not. The fate of either is unimportant to the fate of the larger open source paradigm.</p>
+<p>The open source paradigm doesn’t work for everyone. As Perens put it in a conversation we had as I was wrapping this up, “you can use any license you want as long as you don’t call it open source, that’s your freedom. But we have certain rights that come with open source it doesn’t make sense to give these up to protect a business model.”</p>
+<p>Through all the conversations I had with developers and founders, one line kept coming back to me. System76 founder Carl Richell told me: “if generosity isn’t built into open source, it isn’t going to work.”</p>
+<p>Generosity in this case is the right to use the software for any purpose.</p>
+<p>This has always been the basic litmus test for new open licenses – is the license limiting the generosity of the software? What got open source where it is today is that it could be used anywhere, with anything. Need to combine open source and proprietary software? No problem. Need to re-write that open source library so it can interface with your proprietary code? No problem. Want to take that open source library, wrap it up as a service and sell it? No problem. Because in the end, that’s what open source is: freedom through generosity. And as Perens points out, that’s what it is even when that model doesn’t work for a particular business.</p>
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+Free and open source software enables the world as we know it. From web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining your Facebook feed, nearly every computer system you interact with runs, at least in part, on free software. Free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and enabled the [largest software acquisition](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/ibm-buys-red-hat-with-eye-on-cloud-dominance/) in the history of the world. 
+
+Free software is a gift. It's the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It's an astounding gift to give. So astounding in fact that it made businesses unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. They weren't unwilling to use free software, it was too radical and by extension, too political. It had to be renamed "open source." 
+
+Once that happened open source software took over the world. 
+
+Recently though there's been a disturbance in the open source force. 
+
+Redis Labs, MongoDB, and Confluent all changed their software licenses in recent months, moving away from open source licenses to more restrictive terms that limit what can be done with the software, making it no longer open source software. 
+
+The problem, argue Redis Labs, MongoDB and others, is hosted software services. Also known as, "the cloud." Also known as Amazon AWS.
+
+Amazon, for it's part, recently came out swinging, releasing its own version of the code behind Elastic Search in response to licensing changes at Elastic. Interestingly, Elastic, the company behind Elastic Search, has a very different response from that of MongoDB and Redis -- it hasn't said a word in protest. 
+
+## Cloud Burst
+
+MongoDB the company is built around the open source "NoSQL" database of the same name. MongoDB's database is useful for storing unstructured data, for example images, which it can handle just as well as it handles more traditional data types. Data is stored in JSON-like documents rather than the columns and rows of a relational database. Since there's no structured tables there's no "structured query language" for working with the data, hence the term "NoSQL." 
+
+MongoDB is not the only NoSQL database out there, but it's one of the most widely used. According to industry aggregator, DB Engines, MongoDB is the [fifth most popular database](https://db-engines.com/en/ranking), with everyone from Google to Code Academy to Foursquare using MongoDB. 
+
+MongoDB is also leading the charge to create a new kind of open source license, which CTO Eliot Horowitz believes is necessary to protect open source software businesses as computing moves into the new world of the cloud.
+
+The cloud, argue Horowitz and others, requires the open source community to re-think and possibly update open source licenses to "deal with new challenges in a new environment." The challenges are, essentially, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, which are all capable of taking open source software, wrapping it up as a service and reselling it. The problem with AWS or Azure wrapping up MongoDB and offering it as part of a software as a service (SaaS), is that it then competes with MongoDB's own cloud-based SaaS -- MongoDB Atlas. What's threatened then is not MongoDB's source code, but MongoDB's own SaaS derived from that source code, and which is the company's chief source of revenue.
+
+To combat the potential threat to its bottom line, MongoDB has moved from the Gnu Public License (GPL) to what it calls the Server Side Public License, or SSPL. The SSPL says, in essence, you can do anything you want with this software, except use it to build something that competes with MongoDB Atlas. 
+
+Originally MongoDB submitted the SSPL to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the organization that oversees and approves new open source licenses, but after seeing the writing on the wall -- discussion on the OSI mailing lists, combined with the wording of the license made it unlikely the SSPL would ever be approved by the OSI -- MongoDB has withdrawn the SSPL from consideration. 
+
+The SSPL is not an open source license and it never will be.
+
+To understand why it helps to realize that MongoDB is not the first open source business to run into this situation. In fact, part of this problem -- companies taking software, using it as they please and contributing nothing back -- is the reason open source software exists at all. 
+
+Open source licenses vary, but the gist is generally, you can take this code and do what you want with it, but you can't make the code proprietary, and if you use it in another project, then that project can't be proprietary either. These licenses were written this way to prevent companies from taking open source code, using it in their own code and not sharing any of it back to the original project.
+
+Horowitz argues that wrapping a piece of code in a SaaS offering is the modern equivalent of using it in an application.
+
+It is a novel argument, but it's in defense of a very old problem that goes well beyond licensing. It's a problem that goes all the back to the beginning of free software -- how do you make money off software if you give it away for free? 
+
+One traditional answer has been that you sell services around your open source software. But for Horowitz that's not good enough. "Monetizing open source with support contracts has never been a great business model," he tells Ars. Red Hat would likely disagree, but Horowitz believes that more protective licenses would bring more venture capital investment and spawn more software businesses based on the open model MongoDB has used. "We're unique," he says, "I want us to be less unique."
+
+He may be correct. A more protective license could induce more venture capital investment because there's (arguably) a greater likelihood of return on their investment. But if that capital did come, it wouldn't be investing in open source because that kind of restriction on the software means it no longer fits the definition of open source.
+
+Quite a few open source advocates have already made the counter argument that the current set of licenses are fine, it's the business models that need work. 
+
+Bruce Perens, co-author of the original [open source definition](https://opensource.org/docs/osd), says the SSPL is incompatible with the OSI's open source definition number nine, which says that the "license must not restrict other software." Since the SSPL forces any SaaS software that is aggregated with the covered software, but not a derivative of it, to nevertheless be open source, it fails this test. "I wrote number nine into the OSD to prohibit exactly this sort of conduct," says Perens, "the text is really clear."
+
+But MongoDB is not the only one complaining that the cloud is raining on its profits.
+
+Redis Labs, another data storage company, was the first to sound the alarm about cloud providers threatening its business and Redis Labs may have the better solution. Redis Labs initially changed its license to include something called the Common Clause sub-license, which forbids anyone from selling any software it covers. Software licensed with the Common Clause is not, by anyone's definition, open source, which Redis Labs acknowledged. It has never described those portions of its software as open source.
+
+As this article was wrapping up Redis Labs made yet another licensing change, in essence dropping all pretense of being open source software and adopting a homegrown proprietary license for some of its modules. To be clear, most of Redis is governed by the Apache 2.0 License, but some modules are not, namely RedisJSON, RedisSearch, RedisGraph, RedisML and RedisBloom. 
+
+The license Redis Labs applies to these modules says that while users can view and modify the code, use it in their applications, it restricts which types of applications they can build. With Redis Labs' new license you are not free to build anything you want. You cannot build database products, a caching engine, a processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or any kinds of ML or AI derived serving engine. You cannot in other words use Redis Labs' code to compete with Redis Labs. This violates one of the core tenants of open source licensing -- that there be no restrictions on derivative software. 
+
+Unfortunately for both companies it doesn't make sense to simultaneously say that you are open source, and that only you should profit from your open source software. There *is* a business model where than does make sense: proprietary software.
+
+That's a path that Elastic.co has hewed for some time. While part of the problem here is that there is no playbook set in stone yet, some companies has managed to prosper with both open source and proprietary code. Elastic, makers of Elasticsearch and other open source tools, has faced the exact competition from AWS and soldiered on. 
+
+Not only has Amazon for years offered Elasticsearch on AWS (ostensibly competing with Elastic's own offerings), Amazon recently packaged up its own version of the Elasticsearch codebase, extending it to offer for free several of the services Elastic hasn't released as open source. Elastic's response has been little more than the corporate equivalent of a shrug. 
+
+## Lessons from history
+
+Why does MongoDB want to be open source at all? After all there is no shortage of very successful proprietary software, so why not embrace that path and move on?
+
+Horowitz tells me he believes "that open source results in better systems software, especially databases," going on to cite security and community as advantages of remaining open source. He's right about both of those things, those are often cited as reasons to use open source software -- more eyes on the software means fewer bugs, better security.
+
+But looking at the open source definition, it's clear that Horowitz is missing one key component that's built into to every open source license -- generosity. 
+
+Open source does not limit what you can do with the software, ever. Full stop. This may well be the chief reason for its success, it's certainly what made it palpable to large businesses in the first place. 
+
+Generosity of this kind is how you get community, the cornerstone on which any successful open source project is built. By allowing the widest possible range of users to use your software you get the biggest possible community. More eyes on bugs, more people fixing them. That community is what turns into momentum. That momentum becomes market share. Sometimes market share becomes profit, but that's not a promise of open source.
+
+As Bruce Perens puts it, "we have to draw a line between open source... and the right to make money with open source. The open source definition allows, but does not support, your right to make money. We're not going to change the rules because you can make money better that way."
+
+To its credit, Horowitz and MongoDB seem to have come around to this point for view, or at least accepted the inevitability of it when they withdrew the SSPL from consideration as an OSI-approved license.
+
+Just because you build it and they come, does not mean massive profit. 
+
+In fact, if you build it and they come and then you take it away, it might be worse than if you'd never built it.
+
+Redis Labs' move away from open source comes after it reaped all the benefits of open source -- community support, wide adoption and code contributions from a widespread sources. To put it bluntly, Redis Labs angered the community. 
+
+When free software developers get mad, they get forking, and there is indeed a fork of Redis, [GoodFORM](https://goodformcode.com/). GoodFORM takes the re-licensed Redis modules as they were prior to the license change, and will maintain them for Debian, Fedora and other Linux distros that cannot ship proprietary software. 
+
+The unintended consequence of Redis Labs' new license is that anyone wanting to use a full and open source version of Redis will have to use GoodFORM, not Redis. 
+
+Individual developers might not much care, but large companies looking to use open source software aren't so cavalier. For them it usually comes down to a choice, either use clearly open source software with an OSI approved license, or call the lawyers. And no one ever wants to call the lawyers just to install a piece of software. 
+
+Perens tells Ars that this was one of the key motivations behind the intimal open source definition (originally written for the Debian project). "The open source definition means that you shouldn't need a lawyer just to be a user," says Perns. "And one of the ways we do that is minimizing the legal load."
+
+Redis Labs' new license puts companies in the position of needing a lawyer, and GoodFORM becomes the more logical choice. This also may hint at why MongoDB wanted to remain open source.
+
+Other open source projects which have changed to closed source licenses have not fared well. The Xfree86 project was the defacto standard for running X Windows for most of the 1990s, up through the early 2000s. In 2004 Xfree86 began shipping code that the Free Software Foundation felt was counter to the GPL. The downstream operating systems using Xfree86 decided that was unacceptable and a fork, X.org, was born. Today X.org occupies the place Xfree86 once did and Xfree86 is abandoned. 
+
+Other examples are easy to find, LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice, MariaDB came out of license changes in MySQL, Wireshark came out of Ethereal, the list goes on, but the key thing to note is not just that the forks happened, but that they took with them the developers, the community, the momentum that sustains open source software over the long haul. Lose the goodwill of the open source community and it can be vicious in exacting its revenge. It's also efficient in doing so, Xfree86 was effectively dead six months after X.org began, OpenOffice disappeared into irrelevancy similarly quickly.
+
+The overwhelming lesson of open source history is that once you are open source, it's very unlikely you will change that and survive.
+
+## What makes open source work: generosity
+
+If open source history teaches that there is no going back, it's worth considering why. 
+
+[Beanbooks](https://beansbooks.com/opencode), a little project spun out of Linux computer manufacturer System76 is a perfect example of what Perens sees as an ideal open source software scenario. In <cite>[The emerging economic paradigm of Open Source](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1470/1385)</cite> Perens argues that a company's non-differentiating software is its best scenario for open source software. That is, open source the infrastructure of the business, not the core.
+
+To put it another way, Beanbooks was not System76's profit center, but it is an enabling technology for System76's profit center -- building Linux-based computers. 
+
+However, despite being a perfect candidate for an open source license, Beanbooks is not open source. Why?
+
+System76 sells a hosted version of Beanbooks, a SaaS, and at the time the company was worried that a larger company would come along, take the GPL code, essentially clone Beanbooks and get all the profit from System76's investment. 
+
+System76 founder Carl Richell says he can empathize with MongoDB and Redis Labs, but he has already been down the worry-about-someone-stealing-your-code-for-competing-SaaS road and regrets it. "Our concern was that someone would wrap up the software and we would lose all our investment." He says System76 wanted something like patent protection for a few years, but that "ended up hurting us, hurting the platform, and we shouldn't have had those concerns."
+
+While the SaaS version of Beanbooks looks to be fine, the available code does not get updates and is, from a free software perspective, fairly useless. The Github page is a ghost town. There's no development, no community. 
+
+Beanbooks the service carries on, but it does so without a community contributing ideas, code and everything else vibrant open source projects have. Richell thinks Beanbooks might have avoided its fate if it had a GPL or similar license from the beginning. 
+
+"If it was good enough that someone wanted it that's great," says Richell. The key to success for Ritchell isn't the open source software, it's the innovation. "Differentiation is not what you've done today, but how rapidly you can advance," he says. As the software developer you have a head start, and, hopefully, a vision of where you are going, those are your differentiators, to use Perens' terms. 
+
+"The only way to be successful is to stay ahead," says Richell, "I don't think the license has anything to do with it."
+
+The Chef project, makers of various software automation and deployment tools, seems to agree and offers an alternative course to that of MongoDB and Redis. Chef recently announced it would change its license to be completely open source (under the Apache 2.0 license). "We welcome anyone to use and extend our software for any purpose in alignment with the four essential freedoms of Free Software," writes Chef CEO Barry Crist. While Crist doesn't mention any other companies, it's hard to see the specific language of "the four essential freedoms" as anything but a response to Redis and MongoDB.
+
+## What the future looks like
+
+Everyone loves an underdog, and Redis Labs and MongoDB want to portray themselves as the open source underdogs waging a heroic battle against the forces of evil in the form of AWS. But are they?
+
+Redis Labs and MongoDB both look like very healthy companies. Redis Labs recently raised $60 million dollars in funding and, based on the companies doing the funding, looks poised for a successful IPO. MongoDB's IPO last year was, by all accounts, a huge success. It's stock IPOed at $24 and has steadily climbed ever since then. Today it trades at at around $100 a share. Just before this article went to press one of MongoDB's biggest users, Lyft, did defect to Amazon, but after a slight stock drop, MongoDB's stock was right back up where it was before Lyft defected.
+
+Neither company is hurting. At least not yet. The fallout from their license changes remains to be seen, but given that much of the development of MongoDB comes from employees, it will likely be fine regardless of whether it's open source or not. The fate of either is unimportant to the fate of the larger open source paradigm. 
+
+The open source paradigm doesn't work for everyone. As Perens put it in a conversation we had as I was wrapping this up, "you can use any license you want as long as you don't call it open source, that's your freedom. But we have certain rights that come with open source it doesn't make sense to give these up to protect a business model."
+
+
+Through all the conversations I had with developers and founders, one line kept coming back to me. System76 founder Carl Richell told me: "if generosity isn't built into open source, it isn't going to work." 
+
+Generosity in this case is the right to use the software for any purpose.
+
+This has always been the basic litmus test for new open licenses -- is the license limiting the generosity of the software? What got open source where it is today is that it could be used anywhere, with anything. Need to combine open source and proprietary software? No problem. Need to re-write that open source library so it can interface with your proprietary code? No problem. Want to take that open source library, wrap it up as a service and sell it? No problem. Because in the end, that's what open source is: freedom through generosity. And as Perens points out, that's what it is even when that model doesn't work for a particular business.
+
diff --git a/published/opera-reborn3.txt b/published/opera-reborn3.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ec0ad9f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/opera-reborn3.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,101 @@
+Opera Software recently released what the company refers to as Reborn 3, the latest version of its flagship desktop browser. 
+
+At first glance it's tempting to dismiss the name "Reborn 3" as little more than marketing hype, but given the relentless and utterly unspectacular updates that the Chromium project releases every six weeks, it can be hard to denote actual big releases of browsers based on Chromium, hence the "Reborn" moniker. And, for Opera, this is a significant update that goes far beyond what arrived with the move to Chromium 60.
+
+Opera Reborn 3 -- or Opera 60 if you want to stick with version numbers -- brings a slew of features that recently debuted in Opera's mobile browsers to the desktop. The big three in this release are support for blockchain-secured transactions, a crypto wallet to go with the mobile version and a new look with light and dark themes available.
+
+If you haven't checked out Opera lately, it's worth revisiting, especially for those older Opera fans still smarting about the switch from Opera's Presto rendering engine to Google's Blink rendering engine. 
+
+Opera once [filed a complaint](https://www.wired.com/2007/12/opera-to-the-edotudot-internet-explorer-is-ruining-the-web/) with the EU saying that Internet Explorer was holding back the web "by not following accepted Web standards." The founders of Opera (who have since moved on to other things) probably never imagined their browser would one day share a rendering engine with Internet Explorer, but it does now.
+
+And it's true, this is not the Opera of old -- there's no mail client, no IRC support to name a few things -- but it does offer features that make it much more useful than Chrome or Chromium.
+
+Opera's user base, like that of every other web browser, pales next to Google Chrome. But Opera was the originator of many things we all take for granted will be part of any web browser these days. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and the "speed dial" of page thumbnails on new tabs are just a few of the things that started life in Opera. 
+
+Firefox, Chrome and the rest have long since copied all those features, but for quite some time if you wanted to know what the future of the web browser looked like, you checked in with what Opera was doing. That's part of what makes this latest release of desktop Opera interesting, it has quite a few new things that feel well afield of what the rest of the market is doing. 
+
+Opera's innovation track record is impressive and it bears paying attention to what Opera is doing.
+
+## Reborn 3
+
+The first thing that jumps out about Opera 60 is that most of the new features arrived in the mobile version first and were brought to the desktop afterward. This makes sense given that much of Opera's user base is on mobile. Indeed, mobile is where Opera still leads with considerable innovation, especially Opera Touch which manages to do something no other mobile browser has yet pulled off -- making it easy to browse with one hand even on larger devices. 
+
+Opera Touch also has some thoughtful features like a built-in cookie dialog blocker that's actually pretty effective at hiding those annoying legal-compliance cookie notices.
+
+I've also long been a fan of Opera Mini, which is perfect for bandwidth constrained situations. Opera Mini pipes all traffic through Opera's servers to first compress pages after which they are sent on to your phone in much smaller form, saving considerable bandwidth. I wouldn't use it for mobile banking, but it's great for casual web surfing on sketchy 2G/3G connections.
+
+Opera's Desktop offering is considerably less innovative, though it still offers plenty you won't find in Chrome or Firefox, including the new blockchain support and crypto wallet. What will be most obvious to Opera users in this update though is the new look.
+
+Any visual redesign is likely to anger at least some existing users and Opera 60 is no exception, judging by the Opera forums. That said, to my eye the new look is really nice. It's clean, well-thought-out in terms of feature placement, and does a good job of staying out of the way of the actual webpage.
+
+The new look follows the general trend that's enchanted browser makers for some years now -- reducing the user interface to better display the webpage. Opera doesn't carry this trend as far as some competitors though. Opera, for example, still retains its very useful sidebar. 
+
+You can hide the sidebar if you don't use it, but personally I don't worry about the browser using horizontal screen real estate. Even my tiny 12 inch 1080p screen is wider than most websites. What I do dislike is losing vertical real estate to the UI and here Opera has gone full minimalist, taking up fewer vertical pixels than even my other favorite for this reason, Vivaldi.
+
+In fact, the Opera 60 redesign bears more than a passing resemblance to Vivaldi, which has a similar looking sidebar, square tabs and generally minimalist feel. Perhaps Opera has been studying the more recent efforts of its co-founder, Jon von Tetzchner, now CEO of Vivaldi.
+
+While I like Opera's new look, it's not without some shortcomings. Like Firefox, if you open more tabs than will fit on screen, it scrolls them off screen. While I realize many people like this (judging by Opera's user forums), it drives me crazy -- just keep making the tabs smaller. 
+
+On the plus side, Opera's tab menu in the toolbar, complete with large preview images of the currently hovered tab is amazing for quickly finding that tab needle in a haystack. What would be even better is if it could be activated and navigated with the keyboard.
+
+The other two standout improvements in the Opera 60 redesign are two new buttons in the menubar, one for the "easy setup" menu and another for the snapshot tool. The easy setup menu previously lived on the startup page. Moving it to the toolbar means that most things you'd regularly want to change -- theme, clearing browser data, enabling/disabling the sidebar, and more -- are just a click away. This is helpful because Opera's settings page, while not as labyrinthine as Vivaldi's, is still extensive and finding what you want can take a minute.
+
+The snapshot tool is a another nice one to have easy access too, though for those who don't do massive amounts of web-based research it might be somewhat less useful.
+
+## Web 3.0
+
+Once you get past the changes to the user interface, most of what's new in Opera 60 feels, well, ahead of its time. Most users probably aren't going to immediately rush out and start buying everything in cryptocurrencies or switch to storing files on [IPFS](https://ipfs.io/). Still, Opera's blockchain support is interesting, as is the built in Crypto Wallet, which was already part of Opera Mobile.
+
+Crypto anything, let alone wallets, is nearer to the bleeding edge of the internet than most browsers are willing to go. Opera has, wisely I think, left this disabled by default. To turn it on head to the aforementioned easy setup menu and turn on the Crypto Wallet. 
+
+Opera has been heavily touting what it calls Web 3 as part of this release, but just what that means varies considerably by who's using the phrase. What Opera (and others) call Web 3, refers to sites and apps built using blockchain-based distributed tools rather than the traditional client-server model that has powered the internet since the beginning.
+
+But once you get past that initial definition there's often a lot of white papers, hand waving and muttering of the phrase blockchain. The hope is that distributed tools will eventually create a more decentralized web with fewer single points of failure, but that's still a long way off.
+
+The most mainstream part of the decentralized web stack is payment processing. Instead of payments through credit cards or Paypal, there's Bitcoin, Ethereum and others. This is what Opera is supporting with its new Crypto Wallet. Unfortunately for now Opera is only supporting Ethereum. Opera plans to add support for more blockchain currencies down the road.
+
+There's much more to the so-called Web 3 than that though. For every bit of the traditional website stack there is a blockchain-based equivalent. For example instead of Amazon S3 for file storage, there's IPFS or Filecoin. Similarly instead of Amazon EC2 for computational needs, a decentralized app built on Ethereum might use Truebit.
+
+How well these distributed tools work is still an open question, but they are starting to be used in the wild and you can expect to hear much more about them in the near future. Examples of sites that use (some) of this new tech stack include would-be Ebay replacement [Openbazaar](https://openbazaar.org/) and YouTube alternative [Flixxo](https://flixxo.com/#/).
+
+What makes all this interesting, and more than just hype in my mind, is Opera's track record. The question is, now that its founders are long gone, its rendering engine is shared with dozens of other browsers, and its parent company is a Chinese consortium, does Opera still have the sense of vision that has historically made it a good bellwether for the future of web browsers? That's a question we won't know the answer to for several years.
+
+## Getting More out of Chromium
+
+When Microsoft recently announced that it would, like Opera before it, abandon its own rendering engine and build a new version of its Edge web browser around Blink, which also powers Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, and dozens of others, many people worried that the lack of competition would harm the web. There are after all effectively only two browsers on the web now -- Firefox and everything else.
+
+That may be bad for the web in some ways, but it has an interesting and positive side effect for users -- with everything under the hood the same, browsers have to differentiate themselves on their UI and extra features. 
+
+This is where Opera is miles ahead of most of its competitors. Opera ships with a built-in ad blocker, the ability to easily send pages between desktop and phone using Opera Flow, a built-in RSS reader (called Personal News), and a free HTTP proxy that Opera calls a VPN. 
+
+That last distinction is an important point because while connecting to an HTTP proxy over HTTPS gets you some of the benefits of a true VPN, it lacks others like packet level redirection over the tunnel, which means some add-ons and plugins may not use it. In other words, while better than nothing, Opera's "VPN" does not offer the same level of protection you get connecting to an actual VPN and running all your traffic through it.
+
+It's worth noting that a number of older reviews of Opera's VPN service claim Opera will log your traffic, but the company has a very specific note in its privacy policy that "When you use our built-in VPN service, we do not log any information related to your browsing activity and originating network address."
+
+Of these above-and-beyond-Chrome features, the killer one, to my mind, is Opera Flow. Nearly every browser with mobile and desktop versions offers some way to sync or share tabs between them. Firefox has built in syncing, as does, for that matter, Opera. But Flow is a little different than sync. 
+
+Flow is more immediate, doesn't require setting up an account and doesn't run through anyone else's servers. Instead you "pair" your desktop and mobile browsers using a QR code. Once that's done you can send links, notes, photos and movies between your desktop and mobile device. The connection is private and secure, and your data is encrypted before sending.
+
+The only downside to Flow is that you can only send things back and forth from Opera Touch, not Opera Mini.
+
+Once you get beyond headlining features Opera has some very nice little tools that make everyday browsing better. I'm a fan of the power-saving mode known as Battery Saver. By default it's disabled, but you can head to settings and enable the toolbar button so you can easily toggle Battery Saver on and off. Battery Saver causes Opera to make some background optimizations like limiting animations and limiting tab and plugin activity. Opera claims laptop batteries last 35 percent longer with its battery saver on.
+
+Opera's chat sidebar is another nice feature for those who like to keep their various instant messaging accounts easily at hand, but not taking up a tab in the browser. Opera's chat sidebar works with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and VK.
+
+As someone living abroad, Opera has one last killer feature I wanted to use all the time -- a currency converter menu. Sadly, it doesn't work for my use case.
+
+While I'm browsing, for example, Ebay from Mexico, I usually want prices in US dollars, not the default pesos. In theory, Opera should be able to do this. If you highlight a number a toolbar will appear and automatically convert the number to your preferred currency. Unfortunately, because prices in pesos use a dollar sign, Opera thinks they're already in dollars and doesn't convert them. This feature did work well with all the other currencies I tested.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Before rendering a verdict on Opera I should say that I am a perpetual browser switcher. No browser I'm currently aware of is good enough to keep me using it consistently. 
+
+[Vivaldi](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/vivaldi-2-0-review-meet-your-ideal-browser-if-youre-willing-to-invest-time/) is very close to my ideal browser, but seems to have some memory leaks. Firefox does better with memory, but lacks many features I rely on to get work done. Firefox is also planning to change how it handles DNS in ways that [could seriously compromise](https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2018/08/04/mozillas-new-dns-resolution-is-dangerous/) the browser, which makes me uncertain about its future.
+
+[Qutebrowser](https://qutebrowser.org/) has Vim-inspired, keyboard-driven user interface that's damn near perfect, but it doesn't, and likely never will, support Chrome extentions, which makes fine-grained JavaScript blocking impractical. If I could combine Qutebrowser's Vim-like UI with Vivaldi's features I'd be getting close to my ideal browser. In the mean time I tend to switch things up frequently.
+
+For the last month I've been exclusively using Opera on the desktop. The experience has been a very good one, if not perfect. Using Opera has added a new must-have feature to my list of things I want in a web browser -- Opera Flow. There are lots of sync tools out there to move content between desktop and phone, but I have not found another that's as simple and easy to use as Opera's Flow. I also used the battery saver feature and while I didn't notice anything dramatic in terms of actual battery use, my laptop's fan came on noticeably less often.
+
+In the end though I always end up back at Vivaldi. Two things always draw me back to Vivaldi, the ability to stack and tile multiple pages in a single "tab" view and the ability to manually manage tab memory via the "hibernate background tabs" option, which, if you've got limited RAM and open tons of tabs, can quickly and easily reclaim a considerable amount of memory. While Opera's battery saver mode is capable of something similar, it lacks the level of control Vivaldi offers. Vivaldi lets me pick and choose which tabs to keep active and which to background.
+
+Right now in my perpetual browser switching world Opera pulls a close second to Vivaldi. In fact I'm currently using both. And on my phone, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile remain my browsers of choice until, perhaps, a mobile version of Vivaldi becomes available.
diff --git a/published/opera-review.html b/published/opera-review.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6b9a645
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/opera-review.html
@@ -0,0 +1,73 @@
+<p>Opera Software recently released what the company refers to as Reborn 3, the latest version of its flagship desktop browser.</p>
+<p>At first glance it’s tempting to dismiss the name “Reborn 3” as little more than marketing hype, but given the relentless and utterly unspectacular updates that the Chromium project releases every six weeks, it can be hard to denote actual big releases of browsers based on Chromium, hence the “Reborn” moniker. And, for Opera, this is a significant update that goes far beyond what arrived with the move to Chromium 60.</p>
+<p>Opera Reborn 3 – or Opera 60 if you want to stick with version numbers – brings a slew of features that recently debuted in Opera’s mobile browsers to the desktop. The big three in this release are support for blockchain-secured transactions, a crypto wallet to go with the mobile version and a new look with light and dark themes available.</p>
+<p>If you haven’t checked out Opera lately, it’s worth revisiting, especially for those older Opera fans still smarting about the switch from Opera’s Presto rendering engine to Google’s Blink rendering engine.</p>
+<p>Opera once <a href="https://www.wired.com/2007/12/opera-to-the-edotudot-internet-explorer-is-ruining-the-web/">filed a complaint</a> with the EU saying that Internet Explorer was holding back the web “by not following accepted Web standards.” The founders of Opera (who have since moved on to other things) probably never imagined their browser would one day share a rendering engine with Internet Explorer, but it does now.</p>
+<p>And it’s true, this is not the Opera of old – there’s no mail client, no IRC support to name a few things – but it does offer features that make it much more useful than Chrome or Chromium.</p>
+<p>Opera’s user base, like that of every other web browser, pales next to Google Chrome. But Opera was the originator of many things we all take for granted will be part of any web browser these days. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and the “speed dial” of page thumbnails on new tabs are just a few of the things that started life in Opera.</p>
+<p>Firefox, Chrome and the rest have long since copied all those features, but for quite some time if you wanted to know what the future of the web browser looked like, you checked in with what Opera was doing. That’s part of what makes this latest release of desktop Opera interesting, it has quite a few new things that feel well afield of what the rest of the market is doing.</p>
+<p>Opera’s innovation track record is impressive and it bears paying attention to what Opera is doing.</p>
+<h2 id="reborn-3">Reborn 3</h2>
+<p>The first thing that jumps out about Opera 60 is that most of the new features arrived in the mobile version first and were brought to the desktop afterward. This makes sense given that much of Opera’s user base is on mobile. Indeed, mobile is where Opera still leads with considerable innovation, especially Opera Touch which manages to do something no other mobile browser has yet pulled off – making it easy to browse with one hand even on larger devices.</p>
+<p>Opera Touch also has some thoughtful features like a built-in cookie dialog blocker that’s actually pretty effective at hiding those annoying legal-compliance cookie notices.</p>
+<p>I’ve also long been a fan of Opera Mini, which is perfect for bandwidth constrained situations. Opera Mini pipes all traffic through Opera’s servers to first compress pages after which they are sent on to your phone in much smaller form, saving considerable bandwidth. I wouldn’t use it for mobile banking, but it’s great for casual web surfing on sketchy 2G/3G connections.</p>
+<p>Opera’s Desktop offering is considerably less innovative, though it still offers plenty you won’t find in Chrome or Firefox, including the new blockchain support and crypto wallet. What will be most obvious to Opera users in this update though is the new look.</p>
+
+
+[image="opera-60-default.jpg" caption='The Default look for Opera 60+.']
+
+[image="desktop" caption='Opera 60 also has a dark theme.']
+
+
+<p>Any visual redesign is likely to anger at least some existing users and Opera 60 is no exception, judging by the Opera forums. That said, to my eye the new look is really nice. It’s clean, well-thought-out in terms of feature placement, and does a good job of staying out of the way of the actual webpage.</p>
+<p>The new look follows the general trend that’s enchanted browser makers for some years now – reducing the user interface to better display the webpage. Opera doesn’t carry this trend as far as some competitors though. Opera, for example, still retains its very useful sidebar.</p>
+<p>You can hide the sidebar if you don’t use it, but personally I don’t worry about the browser using horizontal screen real estate. Even my tiny 12 inch 1080p screen is wider than most websites. What I do dislike is losing vertical real estate to the UI and here Opera has gone full minimalist, taking up fewer vertical pixels than even my other favorite for this reason, Vivaldi.</p>
+<p>In fact, the Opera 60 redesign bears more than a passing resemblance to Vivaldi, which has a similar looking sidebar, square tabs and generally minimalist feel. Perhaps Opera has been studying the more recent efforts of its co-founder, Jon von Tetzchner, now CEO of Vivaldi.</p>
+<p>While I like Opera’s new look, it’s not without some shortcomings. Like Firefox, if you open more tabs than will fit on screen, it scrolls them off screen. While I realize many people like this (judging by Opera’s user forums), it drives me crazy – just keep making the tabs smaller.</p>
+<p>On the plus side, Opera’s tab menu in the toolbar, complete with large preview images of the currently hovered tab is amazing for quickly finding that tab needle in a haystack. What would be even better is if it could be activated and navigated with the keyboard.</p>
+
+[image="opera-60-tab-switcher.jpg" caption="Quickly find the tab you're after with Opera's toolbar tab switcher."]
+
+<p>The other two standout improvements in the Opera 60 redesign are two new buttons in the menubar, one for the “easy setup” menu and another for the snapshot tool. The easy setup menu previously lived on the startup page. Moving it to the toolbar means that most things you’d regularly want to change – theme, clearing browser data, enabling/disabling the sidebar, and more – are just a click away. This is helpful because Opera’s settings page, while not as labyrinthine as Vivaldi’s, is still extensive and finding what you want can take a minute.</p>
+
+[image="opera-60-easy.jpg" caption='Easily switch themes and toggle frequently used settings with Opera's "easy menu."']
+
+<p>The snapshot tool is a another nice one to have easy access too, though for those who don’t do massive amounts of web-based research it might be somewhat less useful.</p>
+<h2 id="web-3.0">Web 3.0</h2>
+<p>Once you get past the changes to the user interface, most of what’s new in Opera 60 feels, well, ahead of its time. Most users probably aren’t going to immediately rush out and start buying everything in cryptocurrencies or switch to storing files on <a href="https://ipfs.io/">IPFS</a>. Still, Opera’s blockchain support is interesting, as is the built in Crypto Wallet, which was already part of Opera Mobile.</p>
+<p>Crypto anything, let alone wallets, is nearer to the bleeding edge of the internet than most browsers are willing to go. Opera has, wisely I think, left this disabled by default. To turn it on head to the aforementioned easy setup menu and turn on the Crypto Wallet.</p>
+<p>Opera has been heavily touting what it calls Web 3 as part of this release, but just what that means varies considerably by who’s using the phrase. What Opera (and others) call Web 3, refers to sites and apps built using blockchain-based distributed tools rather than the traditional client-server model that has powered the internet since the beginning.</p>
+<p>But once you get past that initial definition there’s often a lot of white papers, hand waving and muttering of the phrase blockchain. The hope is that distributed tools will eventually create a more decentralized web with fewer single points of failure, but that’s still a long way off.</p>
+<p>The most mainstream part of the decentralized web stack is payment processing. Instead of payments through credit cards or Paypal, there’s Bitcoin, Ethereum and others. This is what Opera is supporting with its new Crypto Wallet. Unfortunately for now Opera is only supporting Ethereum. Opera plans to add support for more blockchain currencies down the road.</p>
+<p>There’s much more to the so-called Web 3 than that though. For every bit of the traditional website stack there is a blockchain-based equivalent. For example instead of Amazon S3 for file storage, there’s IPFS or Filecoin. Similarly instead of Amazon EC2 for computational needs, a decentralized app built on Ethereum might use Truebit.</p>
+<p>How well these distributed tools work is still an open question, but they are starting to be used in the wild and you can expect to hear much more about them in the near future. Examples of sites that use (some) of this new tech stack include would-be Ebay replacement <a href="https://openbazaar.org/">Openbazaar</a> and YouTube alternative <a href="https://flixxo.com/#/">Flixxo</a>.</p>
+<p>What makes all this interesting, and more than just hype in my mind, is Opera’s track record. The question is, now that its founders are long gone, its rendering engine is shared with dozens of other browsers, and its parent company is a Chinese consortium, does Opera still have the sense of vision that has historically made it a good bellwether for the future of web browsers? That’s a question we won’t know the answer to for several years.</p>
+<h2 id="getting-more-out-of-chromium">Getting More out of Chromium</h2>
+<p>When Microsoft recently announced that it would, like Opera before it, abandon its own rendering engine and build a new version of its Edge web browser around Blink, which also powers Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, and dozens of others, many people worried that the lack of competition would harm the web. There are after all effectively only two browsers on the web now – Firefox and everything else.</p>
+<p>That may be bad for the web in some ways, but it has an interesting and positive side effect for users – with everything under the hood the same, browsers have to differentiate themselves on their UI and extra features.</p>
+<p>This is where Opera is miles ahead of most of its competitors. Opera ships with a built-in ad blocker, the ability to easily send pages between desktop and phone using Opera Flow, a built-in RSS reader (called Personal News), and a free HTTP proxy that Opera calls a VPN.</p>
+
+[image="opera-60-news.jpg" caption="Opera's built-in feed reader, Personal News."]
+
+<p>That last distinction is an important point because while connecting to an HTTP proxy over HTTPS gets you some of the benefits of a true VPN, it lacks others like packet level redirection over the tunnel, which means some add-ons and plugins may not use it. In other words, while better than nothing, Opera’s “VPN” does not offer the same level of protection you get connecting to an actual VPN and running all your traffic through it.</p>
+<p>It’s worth noting that a number of older reviews of Opera’s VPN service claim Opera will log your traffic, but the company has a very specific note in its privacy policy that “When you use our built-in VPN service, we do not log any information related to your browsing activity and originating network address.”</p>
+<p>Of these above-and-beyond-Chrome features, the killer one, to my mind, is Opera Flow. Nearly every browser with mobile and desktop versions offers some way to sync or share tabs between them. Firefox has built in syncing, as does, for that matter, Opera. But Flow is a little different than sync.</p>
+<p>Flow is more immediate, doesn’t require setting up an account and doesn’t run through anyone else’s servers. Instead you “pair” your desktop and mobile browsers using a QR code. Once that’s done you can send links, notes, photos and movies between your desktop and mobile device. The connection is private and secure, and your data is encrypted before sending.</p>
+
+[image="opera-60-news.jpg" caption="Send pages, notes, photos and more from the desktop to Opera Touch and back again."]
+
+<p>The only downside to Flow is that you can only send things back and forth from Opera Touch, not Opera Mini.</p>
+<p>Once you get beyond headlining features Opera has some very nice little tools that make everyday browsing better. I’m a fan of the power-saving mode known as Battery Saver. By default it’s disabled, but you can head to settings and enable the toolbar button so you can easily toggle Battery Saver on and off. Battery Saver causes Opera to make some background optimizations like limiting animations and limiting tab and plugin activity. Opera claims laptop batteries last 35 percent longer with its battery saver on.</p>
+<p>Opera’s chat sidebar is another nice feature for those who like to keep their various instant messaging accounts easily at hand, but not taking up a tab in the browser. Opera’s chat sidebar works with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and VK.</p>
+<p>As someone living abroad, Opera has one last killer feature I wanted to use all the time – a currency converter menu. Sadly, it doesn’t work for my use case.</p>
+<p>While I’m browsing, for example, Ebay from Mexico, I usually want prices in US dollars, not the default pesos. In theory, Opera should be able to do this. If you highlight a number a toolbar will appear and automatically convert the number to your preferred currency. Unfortunately, because prices in pesos use a dollar sign, Opera thinks they’re already in dollars and doesn’t convert them. This feature did work well with all the other currencies I tested.</p>
+
+[image="opera-60-currency.jpg" caption="Convert currencies on the fly by selecting text."]
+
+<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
+<p>Before rendering a verdict on Opera I should say that I am a perpetual browser switcher. No browser I’m currently aware of is good enough to keep me using it consistently.</p>
+<p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/vivaldi-2-0-review-meet-your-ideal-browser-if-youre-willing-to-invest-time/">Vivaldi</a> is very close to my ideal browser, but seems to have some memory leaks. Firefox does better with memory, but lacks many features I rely on to get work done. Firefox is also planning to change how it handles DNS in ways that <a href="https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2018/08/04/mozillas-new-dns-resolution-is-dangerous/">could seriously compromise</a> the browser, which makes me uncertain about its future.</p>
+<p><a href="https://qutebrowser.org/">Qutebrowser</a> has Vim-inspired, keyboard-driven user interface that’s damn near perfect, but it doesn’t, and likely never will, support Chrome extentions, which makes fine-grained JavaScript blocking impractical. If I could combine Qutebrowser’s Vim-like UI with Vivaldi’s features I’d be getting close to my ideal browser. In the mean time I tend to switch things up frequently.</p>
+<p>For the last month I’ve been exclusively using Opera on the desktop. The experience has been a very good one, if not perfect. Using Opera has added a new must-have feature to my list of things I want in a web browser – Opera Flow. There are lots of sync tools out there to move content between desktop and phone, but I have not found another that’s as simple and easy to use as Opera’s Flow. I also used the battery saver feature and while I didn’t notice anything dramatic in terms of actual battery use, my laptop’s fan came on noticeably less often.</p>
+<p>In the end though I always end up back at Vivaldi. Two things always draw me back to Vivaldi, the ability to stack and tile multiple pages in a single “tab” view and the ability to manually manage tab memory via the “hibernate background tabs” option, which, if you’ve got limited RAM and open tons of tabs, can quickly and easily reclaim a considerable amount of memory. While Opera’s battery saver mode is capable of something similar, it lacks the level of control Vivaldi offers. Vivaldi lets me pick and choose which tabs to keep active and which to background.</p>
+<p>Right now in my perpetual browser switching world Opera pulls a close second to Vivaldi. In fact I’m currently using both. And on my phone, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile remain my browsers of choice until, perhaps, a mobile version of Vivaldi becomes available.</p>