Slashdot Mirror
Lawsuit Says GPL is a Price-Fixing Scheme
Soko writes "Yes, it's real. The crack team of Daniel Wallace and Maureen O'Gara have ganged up once again to protect their version of "The American Dream," he by filing a lawsuit in Indiana court saying the GPL is nothing more than a price fixing scheme designed to drive software vendors out of business, she by parroting the proprietary vendors' "The GPL kills business" mantra (as well as a few well placed insults at the free software community). I found the story on Groklaw - no links to Ms. O'Gara or Mr. Wallace from me. I'm still kind of dumbfounded at the audacity of Mr. Wallace, but wonder if he has an angle that might have a slim chance of prevailing." This Google search reveals some of Daniel Wallace's views on the GPL.
I'm surprised that Slashdot actually posted this drivel on the front page (well actually the real surprise was the lack of spelling errors!) As has been the case for several months now, O'Gara's articles have become deliberately more provocative and frankly ridiculous as she attempts to push up the banner hits on the LBW/LBN website. I don't think she even bothers to cite anything resembling a fact anymore, but simply blurts out the most ridiculous thoughts that she finds stomping around the inside of her head.
;-)
For anyone who isn't aware, one of the other regular "writers" for LBW/LBN was recently outed, caught trolling on the SCOX message board to pull in more hits with his crackpot theories. It's looking like a company policy.
There's no doubt that MOG is simply using this Wallace fellow to help finance the ailing website. Personally I'm not going to visit it, and I'd suggest anyone else with any sense also not bother. The slashdot effect is exactly the thing they wish for over there... unless everyone visits with Lynx, or images turned off, of course
LBW/LBN is fast becoming the "Jerry Springer show" of the tech news sites...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
The slashdot blurb here says that David Wallace and Maureen O'Gara filed this lawsuit. The Groklaw link however seems to be saying that David Wallace filed the suit and Maureen O'Gara was merely acting as volunteer PR shill for it. My OP post above took the slashdot blurb by its letter.
What exactly is the relationship of Ms. O'Gara to this lawsuit?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The software industry is a service industry operating under the guise of a manufacturing industry.
:)
Of course there are some exceptions -- the gaming industry, for example (though MMORPGs have the "subscription service" thing down). Unfortunately I can't name any others at the time but I'm sure there's more.
The GPL isn't a price-fixing scheme...it basically exposed the current artifically inflated price-fixing scheme that is proprietary software.
Adapt and evolve, baby. Or cry about it all the way to extinction.
Okay, normally a price-fixing scheme artificially inflates pricing. Price fixing laws are there to protect the consumer, iirc, and I'd say the GPL is the ultimate consumer protection.
Wouldn't dumping be a more accurate complaint, since anti-dumping laws protect other businesses from large competitors selling for below cost? But since there's virtually no cost involved in making copies of software and the R&D is typically recouped by service contracts with IBM, Red Hat and the like, this lawsuit would appear to fall under the catagory of 'hilarity'.
I don't mind paying for software (except for basic OS and utilities), but if you're going to charge me for it, you damn well better be offering a better product than what a bunch of students and professionals crank out in their spare time for free.
business practices addressed by legislation, i.e. giving away M$ windows based computers until Apple is out of business, until the GPL software drives someone out of business AND then requires payment.
Technically speaking, its all true - FOSS is a (somewhat loose) form of communism, the GPL is like cancer and free programs that are often better than commercial counter parts may drive products out of business. My point is, who cares? If America is a free country how can it be dictated what people code in their 'free' time? if you choose to work for nothing why should you be stopped? Should charity/volunteer work be banned too? Ok so thats a little simplistic view of what this lawsuit is about but hey..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
"Really now, how does the GPL fix prices when it allows anyone to charge any amount of money for GPL software?"
And as people are quick to point out about digital goods. They have no value... oh wait, wrong discussion. No "asking for, and getting" are two different things. Plus much like Wal-mart it puts pressure on software practitioners to the lowest price possible.* It most certainly doesn't put pressure on anyone to raise them.
*Throw in globalization and really let the fun begin. Software's free, and the person writting it is damn close to it.
Not to be the devil's advocate here, but you can hardly criticize microsoft for fixing the price of ...say...IE at $0 and then bash those who dont like the price of something else (like openoffice) being fixed at $0.
Illegal monopolies aside, you seem to want to have your cake and eat it, too.
Testing the GPL in court over an issue like this only strengthens the GPL. As others have already pointed out, the GPL doesn't specify a price for software, so the suit is rather absurd/hard to win.
Once this suit is put to rest, then it will be significantly harder for someone to argue the same point.
eskwayrd = m^2c^4
Illegal monopolies aside
Oh, we can just leave that out?
Giving things away for free for the purpose freedom is different than giving things away for free in order to cement an illegal monopoly and drive competition out of the market, is it not? Both may kill companies, but only one allows a company to gouge its customers.
3% of our DNA aside, we're all chimps.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
There is a rather vocal individual in the comp.lang.lisp group that makes the argument free software is evil, because it makes it impossible to charge enough for software to make a living. To be fair, he feels this way about ANYTHING for free, so while I strongly disagree with him he is consistent. I'd dearly love to hear him and Stallman have an hour long debate, but I doubt it will ever happen.
People seem to think they have some kind of entitlement to profits. People, the world doesn't owe you ANYTHING. Generally speaking, if you can't convince people to pay you money for your work, it's your problem. If part time hobbiest developers can create free tools that are better for the price than your commercial ones, I'd say you need to work harder.
In a true capitalistic system, profits are VERY hard to come by. This is a good thing, because people work hard without sucking in a huge amount of resources, to the betterment of society. Competition sucks, because you never get to rest on your laurels. You have to keep running to stay in place, and frankly that's BY DESIGN. It is very nearly the whole POINT. You have to really produce something people want to get a profit, and you have to keep innovating to keep it. If volunteer efforts can produce a free tool which is good enough, that means you need to step it up a notch to produce something people want to pay you for. After all, you're expecting to be paid, so you should be able to put more time/energy into it.
Seesh. What ever happened to doing something just to make the world a better place, or make other people happy? Now it's price fixing. I feel very sad when I see this kind of thing, because it underlines how little regard we have for the world around us. The world is a cold, empty place when people generously and cheerfully giving you something out of the goodness of their hearts is looked upon as price fixing, and it's enough to make me sick.
The worst part of it is, in many these companies are making a profit over and above what they are paying their employees, and yet somehow this isn't enough. Providing people with productive, well paying jobs isn't the point, the point is MAKE MORE MONEY.
At some point in the future, we are going to hit a situation where our economy CANNOT, because of limitations of physical resources, be driven by growth. It will have to be steady state, and I think the US is doomed when this happens because we don't know how not to be greedy, to appreciate the community around us, and be happy that it is prospering. We are focused on ME,ME,ME, and it can't go on forever. The Earth is finite, and the energy costs of space travel are not economic on the large scales of the global system. We WILL have to face it, and when we do I hope we can remember how to be human beings, and not just profit machines.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Having sat on a jury, I can tell you that that's the intent, but in fact juries have to interpret law in order to decide whether the facts support a guilty or a not guilty verdict.
In my case, the plantiff was a person who was busted for posession of methamphetamine and drug paraphanelia.
Both sides present to the jury what they think will give the best chance for conviction (ie, the prosecution does this) or acquittal (the defense's job). In preparing the papers for the jury, both sides are allowed to submit papers that describe the offense.
Now this guy was guilty as all hell of what he was accused of. After the case was over, the defense attorney came in and asked the jury what she could have done differently, and those of us talking to her agreed that putting him on the stand would've helped - but she said "Oh, I couldn't have done that, because he was in fact guilty."
She then explained that what would've happened had she had the defendant testify was that the prosecution would've asked him about the warrant he was served with, and he would've had to testify as to his drug production history, which would guarantee a conviction.
Also, in amongst the papers we were given was a definition of the statute we were to rule on where it stated that posession of drug paraphanelia required an intent to use - which wasn't proven in the case. I actually stopped to talk to the judge about this after the case was over, and he said "Yeah, defense attorneys use that citation of case precident to try to get their defendants an acquittal - it never works, but they have to try it." The way it was presented was in its case form - and to a non-lawyer, that can be presented to it looks like a statute.
All jokes aside about not being able to avoid jury duty - it is a very interesting process, and if you live in the US, you should try it at least once.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
My real concern is that it is now illegal for me to shovel the snow off of my neighbour's sidewalk. Price fixing against professional show removal services. No more helping out at community events. More price fixing. We are going to have to ban mothers nursing their babies. Price fixing against formula companies. Heck, I suppose I now have to hire a full-time baby-sitter to avoid legal liabilities.
15 USC 13c Exemption: Nothing in the Act approved June 19, 1936, known as the Robinson-Patman Antidiscrimination Act, shall apply to purchases of their supplies for their own use by schools, colleges, universities, public libraries, churches, hospitals, and charitable institutions not operated for profit. Free Software Foundation is a Maine not-for-profit corporation. His case must be based on Section 13, nothing else makes sense. Yet Section 13 is limited. This will be summarily dismissed with extreme prejedice.
Ok, this guy may be a joke.
But what if [Pick Your Favorite Evil] decides to fund a real research to find a way to manipulate the laws until they make the GPL look illegal?
I guess it already has been done, by a number of companies that have interests on OpenSource. We can only speculate about their findings...
I don't know about the USA, but here at Brasil the GPL is a contract. And here, a contract is treated as a "law between peers". So, as long as it doesn't go against the legislation, it's as valid and enforceable as an EULA. Only that an EULA normaly restricts your rights, and give you lot's of rules to be followed... and the GPL grants you rights, since you follow some rules.
I'm not a lawyer, but it would be interesting to see how the GPL stands against the legislation of every country in the world. Pehaps the FSF should put a map online, wiht green areas pointing where the GPL is valid and backed by the laws, and red areas where it's just a bunch of words with no value.
The USA should be painted yellow, I guess.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Okay, let me see if I can distill this down a little bit. I've never heard of this guy before, but his ideas sound worthy of a little analysis, at least.
Contrary to the subject of this story, which equates the GPL to an corrupt trust price-fixing scheme, Mr. Wallace instead seems to consistently promote the idea that the GPL is invalid based on an interpretation of derivative works that requires consent from their author, in addition to the original author, for distribution.
He points out that the FSF and the GPL do not consider such consent to be necessary. He makes a distinction between a unilateral license, like the owner of property letting you borrow their property for free, and a mutual agreement, like you renting property. He claims that the GPL is more like the former, one-sided grant of license than the mutual agreement. Most importantly he claims that a derivative work, to be distributed under copyright law, requires the consent of both the original author and the author of the derivative parts, ie. a mutual contract rather than a one-sided grant of license. He argues that the GPL places no value on the consent of a developer who creates a derivative of a GPLed work.
The crux of his argument seems to revolve around the recursive nature of the GPL. He argues that the GPL may well be valid with regards to an original author and one derivative author. But since it is not a bilateral agreement, the GPL cannot then go on to bind the derivative author to it's terms with regards to distribution of his own work. That, he argues, requires the mutual consent of the original and derivative authors.
As far as I can tell, without having spent hours researching this, it boils down to a choice between two interpretations: either the original author is all-powerful in dictating terms to all successors who create derivative works based on the original, or, each author has dominion over his derivative work, with that work being made possible through mutual agreement with all prior authors, and with distribution of that work to be made possible by agreement of all parties. Mr. Wallace argues that the FSF and the GPL rely upon the former view, while copyright requires the latter.
Discuss...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I've heard repeatedly from greedy people which I know who already have a million bucks that the economy should be Laissez Faire. Of course they don't know it is called that, but that is what they propose. It pisses me off every time. When I explain to them that we've TRIED that and it DIDN'T work they get upity. The funniest part of it all: If you have 1 million dollars only, you're small potatos. Your fortune will get gobbled up by the big guys in a Laissez Faire economy like nothing at all.
Parent opines:
> That's completely false. You should be ashamed
> of yourself. Wallace claims, correctly, that Gnu
> is selling their product for less than what it
> costs to produce it.
Hm. Let's see. Even if we go with your inane fantasy here, just how much do you suppose it costs the GNU project to allow someone to produce software for the world under the GNU license? Aside from the distribution costs (borne by major foundation grants as well as smaller donations from people like me) the costs incurred by the GNU project and the FSF come not from software production, but from from championing the open-source movement and hiring lawyers to fend off idiots (i.e. people like... *ahem*.)
> He also claims, also correctly, that the FSF
> engages in price fixing by getting multiple
> vendors to agree to give their products away
> for free.
And here's where you're getting confused. Laws against price fixing exist not to allow other companies to compete, but to allow consumers to get the benefits of competition by prohibiting collusion of those already in the business.
It's hard to argue that consumers are getting shafted by collusion on the parts of the donors when the consumers don't have to pay for their free software.
> The is anti-competitive, because it
> prevents other vendors who don't want to give
> their products away for free from entering the
> market.
By this logic, we should also outlaw public schools, public libraries, national parks, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, municipal police forces, non-toll roadways, and any other establishments for the public good that don't involve a direct fee-for-service model. After all, they're competing against somebody else's potential business. (Thanks for the idea, but no thanks-- I like *this* world better.)
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
What kind of money can you make delivering ice?
i remember hearing about someone trying to toss around an idea to tow an iceburg to solve a fresh water crisis, ah here it is so apparently is costs 3.3m euros, and you gross an estimated 10.2m euros, if you use the iceburg to generate electricity as well as water. So to answer your question you can make 6.9m euros as an ice delivery person nowadays.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
unfortunately you can't really have the libre without the gratis
if you had to pay per unit licensing for every little bit of code you used then collaborative programming would go nowhere as projects would quickly become far too expensive to use
people coding as a hobby will always be destructive to certain segments of the software development profession
software thats freely availible will also be destructive to some segments (companies that sell boxed software)
but at the end of the day there will always be software that companies need that noone wants to develop for fun and someone is going to have to pay to have that software developed because they need to use it.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Why? Because that is the day Copyright law itself has fallen.
GPL is the flip side of copyright. You simply cannot question the GPL unless you first eliminate copyright laws as we know them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Quite right, parent should be modded insightful.
It's not like this hasn't happened before, after all...
There's the occupation known as "scribe"; a person who, for a fee, writes letters, petitions, etc, for illiterate people. This occupation is in demand where literacy levels are low (and sadly, this is still the case in many poorer countries today). In more developed countries, it's common for the mass of the population to be able to read and write by themselves, without assistance. Tough luck if you used to be a scribe ...
... but hey! which situation is better? Who would seriously reject mass literacy because it's tough on scribes? Only a complete idiot/sociopath like Daniel Wallace.
when communism becomes evil is when it is compulsory. A point you seem to have missed widely.
So it isn't communism that is evil, it is compelling people do something.
So tell me again why Americans hate communism?
meh
For example: Apache, Linux, Java, Perl, Python, MySQL?
I've managed both Apache and IIS, and there is no doubt in my mind that the Apache developers are far from unqualified, and definitely had some sort of incentive to do it properly.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Remember that the GPL encourages you to assign your copyright to the FSF, so that they can defend it on your behalf if necessary. I imagine that that's why they're being sued, rather than all the individual John Does.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
What's the motivation here to compete?
While I can understand 'America's' fear of 'communism' because of the cold war, I think I should point out that there has never been a proper communist government. We've only had socio facists, who used the attractive philosophy, gain power, and then screw everyone (basically...).
Marx himself said that communism is unlikely to work because of humanity, unfortunately. The best example I've seen for a *true* communist, or marxist environment has been rather strange: Star Treck (TNG).
At any rate, to a non-american (I'm British), saying that the GPL is communistic - as an insult - just seems ever so slightly, ah, how do I say this without being modded troll....it seems rather idiotic.
My UID is prime. Is yours?
You mean that period of history where most of the world was brainwashed into believing another economic system was a threat to their own, perpetuating the end of WW2 through until it became too difficult to conceal the truth about how other cultures lived?
At which point it became the War on Terror.
I agree with your sentiment, I guess, but the cold war is a bad example of since it was overshadowed by an arms race by both sides and was also a propaganda war.
I think what he probably meant was that it's wierd some people still can't examine an alternative way of organising society for what it is and leave aside the fact that the whole system was corrupt, like ours is.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Did something specific happen to Groklaw to cause this change, or is it just the consistent barrage? Either way, I hope Grok backs off a bit. I used to read it specifically because it was free from this sort of bile.
Look, I do understand the point that you are trying to make. You are implying that the communist system has such flaws within itself that it which inevitably lead to all those under it becoming slaves.
However as someone who is not an American (and also not a European either), I fail to understand the virulant hatred most Americans have towards communism. Communism has flaws, that is not in question. But the flaws are hyped far out of proportion. To listen to some, communism is the greatest ill this world has ever seen, and is evil personnified.
Comparing some of the regimes that have been supported by the US to some communist regimes is not always favourable to the US. Most of the things that the US accuses communism of can equally be directed back at the US.
So to get back to the original point, you said that the problem was compelling people to do something. How would you react to an anti-communist dictatorship that compels people to do things that they don't want to do?
meh
.. just like the argument for international trade.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
I think of GPL and Open Source software as the baseline.. Like those signs near the line for a roller coaster that say "You must be this tall to ride". The GPL software says "Your software must be better than this" in order to sell it.
IMHO, the GPL is good for capitalism. Capitalism is all about competition forcing companies to constantly improve their products, and competition from GPL software will force advancement at a much greater speed than it would be at otherwise.
Those who don't like it, are the lowest tier. They'll be the first driven out of business. Not because of the GPL per se, but because of their own incompetence and inability to adjust to new business reality. Incompetent companies going out of business is, and has always been, good for capitalism and good for consumers.
An intelligent company would look at the OSS movement and see what they can do to adjust to it. Fighting it won't help, the tighter they squeeze their grip, the more star systems will slip between their fingers..
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Communism is evil to someone who believes in individual liberty and freedom. It is also flawed that everyone gets the same benefits from society irregardless of how useless they are. It encourages people to be lazy since someone else will do the work for them and there is no benefit to working hard and achieving something. Humans are flawed and selfish creatures, so this ideal world is not possible to create. Capitalism and democracy also have many flaws, but it is the least bad system of government created up to this point.