Who says employees don't have the full picture? The reasons are even stated in public.
Why would they be terrified of speaking in public -- and if they are, why are several people doing it?
You say that speculating is not particularly useful, and you still speculate that people are terrified of Opera Software, and that the company is lying to its investors about the number of employees?
Operators are less than 20%. Desktop is the second biggest with nearly 30%, while publishing/advertising is the biggest revenue source with more than 40%.
Are you seriously suggesting that the company is using threats of physical violence to shut former employees up?
Who cares about the founder? He previously said he wouldn't necessarily block an acquisition. And if Opera wanted to be acquired, why are they doing business like usual, and even buying up other companies?
You are misunderstanding what "using Chromium means." As I replied to cpeterso:
Using the Chromium framework doesn't mean that you are using the actual final Chromium UI. The CEO himself said they're building a new UI.
Differentiation doesn't take place in the browser engine. It take splace in the UI. Most people have no idea which engine they are using, and they don't care.
What makes you think they aren't goig to work on Webkit? Out of those 90 people who left or were fired, there were marketing, sales, etc. personell. Only a minority was probably an actual developer.
What makes you think Opera is outsourcing development to Google? Just because something is using a framework doesn't mean they aren't using it to build their own thing on top of it.
Your comment doesn't make sense. It's wild speculation based on an article with false statements.
The story is misleading. 90 people have either left of their own free will or were let go for various reasons. Those 90 were not all developers, but included marketing, sales, and other non-engineering staff.
All the comments so far therefore seem to be based on the misconception that they fired their entire Presto development team.
Your conspiracy theory kind of falls flat on its face, since former employees have in fact spoken publicly on this.
What you can gather doesn't seem to be very useful either since the quoted number is correct. It's the number of employees reported by Opera to the authorities. But maybe in your conspiracy, Opera manipulates those numbers to lie to the authorities for some unknown, sinister reason?
How is the current management different from the previous management? Didn't the previous management fire anyone? Oh, they did? And they made up some BS reason to justify it?
Do you know what the reason is stated to be this time around, or did you just assume that they are firing random people to strike fear in people's hearts?
My Gawd.
Edit: Regarding people living in fear, here's one of the former employees speaking out:
"The process, from Opera’s side, was done, IMO, very professionally and the severance package we were offered was voluntary as well as substantial."
Except that is not true. Opera has a high tolerance, probably much higher than any other browser (out of necessity). But that doesn't help much if you're being blocked or sites constantly find new bugs in other browsers they decide to work around and thereby breaking it in any browser that is not one of the top 3.
False. Opera has said they will contribute to both WebKit and Chromium.
> But it is the case here when Opera is using an enormous codebase by a huge corporation
WebKit is not Google's codebase.