Ad revenue from search engines. Plus Opera licenses and optimizes their browser in unbranded capacities to all types of folks. Everyone from Nintendo to some feature phone manufacturers. They’re also on the W3C board and do develop and help to introduce open web standards.
Open web standards (open standards period) are pretty damn important. They’re a hell of a lot more important than software being open source. What would be the point of having the source if you can’t understand or legally use the standard of that source? It’s why we can have competition in web browsers and multiple other markets, otherwise most of the world would be like console gaming. You would only have access to certain things that you wanted (like websites) based upon whatever content/feature accessor that you chose.
There’s money in standards and standards development too. Look at the issue with the new SIM technology because of Apple. Look at Opera and other browsers having to adopt webkit compliance because of Apple (well no, it’s really because of web developers targeting webkit instead of open standards). Look at the crapload of document formats (partly Microsoft’s fault but there are formats available to fit specific needs). .Doc was not decided upon, it become a forced, de facto standard. Until recently it was tough to compete against Office. Open Standards encourage competition without harming the consumer and closed standards encourage lock-in and market fragmentation based upon that lock-in.
I went a bit off base there just to make one last point. Just like MYSQL, companies support Opera because of the standards compliance, developer talent and other neat features that they provide (like Opera Turbo). Turbo and Mini are loved by carriers and handset makers because of its’ speed and very significant data savings of their tech. They help to maintain their interest by being first to a lot of frigging features in web browsers. They arguably implement many of them the best too.
