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GPL Price-Fixing Lawsuit Dismissed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the mostly-without-merit dept.

ansak writes "The case of Wallace vs. the Free Software Foundation has been dismissed. It wasn't entirely on the merits of the case. From PJ's analysis, 'despite the judge clearly telling him where his previous complaint was lacking, he didn't fix it.... In this case, he had five tries.' Nevertheless, the judge did make a strong statement that the GPL 'encourages, rather than discourages, free competition' and ordered Wallace to pay court costs: 'Judges do that when they'd like you to learn a good lesson. It's a signal you shouldn't have brought the case in the first place.'"

2 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. I love irony by hey! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Honestly, pro se lawsuits tend to be disasters. If you can't find a lawyer willing to represent you, it usually means you don't have a case. Quoth TFA.

    I didn't know what the term pro se in TFA meant, so I went to answers.com, which helpfully corrected my "misspelling":

    Prose
    Ordinary language people use in speaking or writing...

    I guess that lawsuits based on ordinary language would be a disaster. By the way, "pro se" apparently refers to self-representation, the proverbial provence of lawyers with fools for customers.

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    1. Re:I love irony by rewinn · · Score: 3, Interesting

      >I guess that lawsuits based on ordinary language would be a disaster

      ...for much the same reason that software written in natural language can have difficulties.

      Documents that describe how something should work out and the reasons for it, whether in the legal or the engineering realms, necessarily require technical jargon and precise structure, if they are to have predictable results. The legal "programming language suffers the grave disadvantage of having been crafted over centuries by thousands of people. Some of them were dickering in court, who were often interested in dealing with their particular case, and others were working in legislatures, who are often interested in something else entirely. The result is a language with the clarity of Assembler and the efficiency of COBOL.

      All this effort, and the results may still not be substantively just, but after all engineers too can have difficulty making clear specs conform to what the customer wants. What can ya do?

      P.S. your "pro se/prose" observation was delightful!

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