To me it's how a brand builds trust. Sure you can build trust with open source (afterall, if you can see the source code and build it yourself, it CAN be trusted), but you can also build trust by not being dodgy.

I've been using Opera since its paid days, and despite having switched browsers every year or so, I've still gravitated back to Opera as my day-to-day browsing browser. That's the value of their brand.