Trond Werner Hansen Responds To Opera’s Claims

Offers the other side of the coin.

Yesterday, Opera revealed that they are suing one of its ex-employees, Trond Werner Hansen, who allegedly leaked trade secrets to Mozilla. Now, the man himself has decided to provide further details and explain the reason behind the case.

According to Hansen, after leaving Opera in 2006 he had an idea about developing a striped down version of a web browser, which would not only be an open source project but also have a unified search and address field as well as provide contributions to a green cause. As it turns out, Google had a similar idea too as they released Chrome few years later.

Anyway, fast forward to 2008 and he is sharing the idea with Opera’s CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, who approached him and apparently was very interested right up the point where Hansen asked for 1% of the search revenue. The deal breaks loose and none of the ideas of are transferred to Opera.

After he re-joined Opera Software in 2009 as a consultant, Hansen shares his ideas again (that are based on his older browser concepts) and one year later abandons the company to join Mozilla.

And that leaves us where we are right now. Hansen reveals a prototype web browser called Junior and all hell breaks loose because one of the Mozilla’s employees mentions “Search Tabs” in the video, which, according to Opera, proves that Hansen told trade secrets to Mozilla that are worth $3.4 million in damages. That’s pretty much what happened.

It will be interesting to see how this story unfolds as Hansen ends his post saying that, “I strongly disagree with their position and I believe I have been wrongly accused, and that I can prove my case.”.