Opera is just doing what even Microsoft has done long before them - heck, even before the end of the IE-NN war ended, and that was when? 1999?

Yes, we would all like Opera to be open-source, and we would like MSIE to be so as well... But let's face it, Opera is really contributing on other arenas - the mobile browsing arena for instance, that means they cannot let it all go opensource... You need a solid foundation, in my opinion, in order to let the good-willers have their go at something...

Then, what is the buzz all about, you ask - well, I wrote an article on it myself, on JorgenArnor.com, and let me explain it to you; the big fuzz is due to the fact that the last, bug commercial contender on the browsing arena went non-commercial (I see you have a problem with the word 'free', so I won't use that one) - and that is, in light of the late-nineties browser war, something of a symbolic 'end of the commercial war'...

It doesn't make Opera a better browser, it doesn't make it open-source as you point out, it doesn't make it anything else than an ad-free version of Opera - but - there are no longer any big, commercial webbrowsers on the market. That's what the buzz is all about!