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Wallace's Second Anti-GPL Suit Loses
Enterprise OpenSource Magazine is reporting that Daniel Wallace's second Anti-GPL lawsuit has gone down in flames. From the (short) article: "The judge wrote that 'Antitrust laws are for 'the protection of competition, not competitors.' In this case, the GPL benefits consumers by allowing for the distribution of software at no cost, other than the cost of the media on which the software is distributed. 'When the plaintiff is a poor champion of consumers, a court must be especially careful not to grant relief that may undercut the proper function of antitrust.' Because he has not identified an anticompetitive effect, Wallace has failed to allege a cognizable antitrust injury.'"
Judges stand up for consumer shocker.
Read all about it!
If you're interested then have at these instead:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Wallace_(plai
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060320
He has had no luck with anything since he broke up with Grommit.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
"If you can't find a lawyer willing to represent you, it usually means you don't have a case."
That may be true for this case, but more often than not it means you can't afford the lawyer's fees whether you've got a case or not. Justice and the legal process are things that are for sale in the United States these days. If you've got a small business there are any number of silly lawsuits your enemies can bring against you that will bleed you dry in legal fees alone. And that's for DEFENDING yourself against a bogus complaint, never mind prosecuting a case where you know you're in the right.
What surprises me is not that Wallace was laughed out of court. That was almost certain for various reasons. What did surprise me is that the judge's comments showed that he really understood the GPL and its role in ensuring a competitive marketplace.
I'm just curious-- who is this Daniel Wallace character, and what does he have to do with the GPL? What prompted the suit? I read the Wikipedia page and there wasn't much on him other than his two suits were thrown out.
I read your post half a dozen times or so and but I can't tell. Do you charge your loved one for making her happy? (I know, I know, I'm making a few assumptions here.)
SysCon really sucks.
They said they wouldn't print any more Maurene O'Gara articles after she went crazy stalking Pamela Jones and making fun of her religion. So now they're printing MoG's articles but without any attribution.
As always with MoG, the article is misleading. The judge didn't accept the facts as true. To dismiss a lawsuit the judge has to say: "If these were all true, should the case go forward?" In this case the answer is no. The "if" is important.
Anyway here is the original article where the Daniel Wallace stupidness started. The actual syscon link is offline because syscon took all MoG's stuff offline.
Daniel Wallace is a net kook. I wouldn't be surprised if he created a slashdot login to respond anonymously to this article. He always posts about how the GPL is a contract not a license. He is not a legal genius but he is funny.
Maurene O'Gara is evil. She lies constantly. I've never seen anyone who is as sick and twisted as she is. I despise her.
The Wiki article isn't too informative and I'm kind of late to the game... I mean we know he sued because he doesn't like GPL, but why doesn't he like GPL? Does he own a closed sourcesoftware buseinss that was trying to compete with Linux? Or is he a paid shill? Or did RMS insult him at a comic book convention? Maybe Linus wrote a scathing reply to his ponies request inclusion to the Linux kernel?
The Wiki and other articles is very uninformative of who this guy is and his motivations and why he would even go out of his way to this. It is like the man spontaneously came into existence just to sue.
Although people have sued other over less...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Dumping at a value less than the cost of production (if you think coders' time is free, you're not much of a coder) isn't anticompetitive?
That's right, like us "dumping" our opinions on the market instead of charging for them like professional opinion writers. Or people singing for the fun of it and letting others listen. Not to mention those evil people who don't charge for sex. They should all be in prison.
(if you think coders' time is free, you're not much of a coder)
Next thing you know, Dockers will be suing women for sewing for free. After that, the association of starving artists will be suing preschoolers for giving their parents free drawings to hang on their refrigerator.
If you think crayons and fingerpaints are free, you're not much of an artist.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Dumping at a value less than the cost of production (if you think coders' time is free, you're not much of a coder) isn't anticompetitive?
Nope. The list is too long to even mention but I think you can start with:
Local theater group doing show without pay (professional actors)
Volunteers at a soup kitchen (the local cafe)
Laywers taking cases pro bono (other lawyers)
Doctors providing free medical aid (other doctors)
Any number of arts and crafts that people sell at less than real cost on fairs and the like
Every local band who can't make a living out of it but plays anyway
Every sort of artist who doesn't make a living out of it, but does it anyway
Every sort of "scratch-an-itch" programmer who doesn't make a living out of it, but does it anyway
Anti-trust requires that there has to be sort of monopolizing intent - that you want to pressure the competitors out of the market, then raise the prices afterwards. In fact, it typically has to go beyond pure pricing (e.g. Wal-Mart killing local shops, McDonalds killing local burger shop) and more on to discrimination and misuse of market power. How can you do that with the GPL? You can't, because there's noone who has that power, not even Linus himself. He couldn't turn around and say "Haha suckers! Now that Linux is the only OS in existance, I'll close it up and become the new Microsoft."
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
""From the (short) article: "The judge wrote that 'Antitrust laws are for 'the protection of competition, not competitors.'"
So what does that say about the Microsoft antitrust case brought up by the likes of Netscape and others?"
IANAL, but AFAIK, it doesn't say anything was wrong, really. They too had to prove in court that not only MS is hurting competition, but also that it hurts the consumer.
I.e., in a nutshell the gist of it is that you can't go and say "I can't compete with company X. Make them raise their prices, so I have a chance." What you have to prove is that first and foremost this has hurt the consumers (e.g., company X is in a position to shamelessly gouge its customers, or companies X and Y aggreed to fix their prices high, or it has some other effect that consumers obviously don't want) and in which way are they creating an artifficial barrier, i.e., other than for example price or brand name, that keeps others from competing.
So in that MS antitrust case, yes, they had to argue that:
A) MS's monopoly is hurting the consumers (e.g., that the cost of a MS OS has been steadily rising in the same time interval where the cost of the computer itself has been steadily dropping. And since at the time it was just short of impossible to buy a computer without Windows, that was an ever-increasing burden upon consumers as a whole.) and
B) that there is an artifficial barrier in the way of anyone trying to compete with MS. The keyword being "anyone", not "me". As was said, those laws are to protect competition, not one or two competitors. That's why for example MS was able to use Linux as an example of "but we still have competitors in the OS arena", although it wasn't the product of Netscape and the other.
You may notice that the same applies to this lawsuit too. See the other quote in the summary, about the GPL allowing people to get programs extremely cheaply. It's not part of the same "protecting the competition" reasoning, but addressing the other (more important) point: then it hasn't hurt the consumer. Without that, you don't really have an anti-trust case.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Wallace is a Physicist who looked at the BSD licence. Basically here is what I can piece together went on in his twisted brain.
"Oooh, look, I can take this, change some strings in it so it says 'WallaceOS' and sell it as a green screen command line OS for shitloads of money per copy, distributing it under a licence so my suckers...er customers can't redistrubite it, and so I don't have to give out the source code."
"WTF... nobody's buying my really cool WallaceOS? WTF there's this thing called Linux that is soooo much better under a licence called the GPL that keeps people from doing what I'm trying to do with BSD? That's anticompetative!!! "
"I must sue the Free Software Foundation and remove this evil thing called Linux and the GPL. It doesn't seem to matter that the FSF has nothing to do with the Linux kernel... only the GNU part of the OS, but who cares.... with the GPL gone, people will buy my l33t WallaceOS for whatever money I want to charge and I'll beeeee riiiiich!!!! I just hope they never hear about FreeBSD!"
How wrong can you be, let me count the ways.
/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 .' just before you burn the iso or pack up the tarball divided by the number of people who then receive the code?
"Dumping"
Dumping implies that the costs can be recouped later by raising prices. In the case of GPL'ed software, the GPL implies the distributor has no monopoly on the distribution so he can't raise his own prices after he 'destroys' the competition and expect the market to let him recoup the costs that way. His competitors can just keep dishing out the same GPL'ed code at the old price.
"at a value less than the cost of production"
The cost of production of someone else's GPLed software is next to nothing. The marginal cost of software distributed on the internet, even the stuff you yourself write, is next to nothing (and marginal cost, or similar measures of cost is generally the measure used for antitrust claims). At least three of the defendants in his lawsuits will happily sell their GPLed code to you for way above the cost of burning their CDs or whathaveyou.
"if you think coders' time is free, you're not much of a coder"
Danny wasn't alleging that the price of the code itself was fixed. He couldn't because the GPL explicitly says otherwise. You can charge money for writing GPLed code, and for copying or distributing the code.
The only thing you can't charge for is *permission* to use the code. How much money does it cost you to give one person permission to use the code? One measure would be the cost of typing 'cp
"This judge"
These two judges
"may have just vacated a couple of hundred trade laws..."
The judges didn't have to look at the trade laws because Danny was unable to write down exactly what damage it was that the GPL did to the software market, after about six or seven attempts in two courtrooms.
For such a small post you have managed to be completely wrong in quite a few different ways. I'm impressed. Is your name Danny Wallace by any chance?
All I could find about him in Google is that he is a physics teacher and a member of the FSF. This raises the question: did he lose on purpose? The whole thing was done so ineptly and without apparent motivation to win that one wonders if he's just trying to work some judicial precedent for the GPL.
He used to be a member of the FSF but that was
long ago.
The last few years he has been in any board he could get into trying to prove the GPL wouldn't have a chance in a court of law and, basically, being laughed at.
He probably couldn't take the laughs any more and he tried to prove he was right.
One woman sewing will not compete on the scale of Dockers.
So? How many does it take? How many grandmas have to knit little mittens for their grandchildren before baby-clothes manufacturers feel the competition? How many people must cook dinner for their families before McDonalds starts feeling the pressure? How many kids must run lemonade stands at rates far below market costs before Minute Maid goes out of business?
How many programmers must work on GPLd code before Microsoft does more than twitch?
Giving your code away for free is stealing from your own retirement.
Explain.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I think that you'll find most judges get the GPL. These are guys that have been lawyers for 20 years, and are generally able to understand insanely complex contracts and licenses that would twist our brains. The GPL must be a breath of fresh air to them, a license that not only doesn't even try to screw the people who accept it over, but that is the equivalent of a well-commented hundred line program. I expect that most judges are able to look at the GPL and think of things in minutes that you or I didn't see after knowing the GPL for years, and imagine how refreshing it must be to see those concepts in print and being used.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
If the intention had been to create a judical precendent for the GPL, he would have had to do better. As is, the case failed at a much too basic level. Basically the court told him, he was not in a position to sue, no less and not much more. The judge did not even have to consider the GPL itself, hence no chanceof creating a real precedent IMO. If at all, what's been ruled on, is that it's not per se illegal to give something away for free. Big deal.
We'll have to wait until somebody else dumb enough to try to disprove the GPL in court, and smart enough to actually get the formal basics right, shows up. Daniel Wallace wasn't the one.
We don't live in a democracy, we live in a republic.
One of the primary principles is the Rule of Law. That means that an informed person usually knows what side of the law they are on before trial. That is only true if judges strictly interpret the law rather than do what they personally think is right.
The Rule of Law is part of the structure, but I see it as an important aspect of our society. The alternative is the Rule of Man, and, historically, that leads to worse outcomes. A law is something anyone can see, or can at least ask a lawyer about in advance. Society is more stable and predictable that way.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Our "Democratic Republic" is a republic, and not a democracy. The post I responded to suggested that democracy was the most important aspect of this country, more so than the structure of the laws. That is the antithesis of a republic.
A republic has certain important restrictions on the power of the majority. For instance, many actions require a supermajority. A democratic republic brings some of the benefits of democracy, but the restrictions are designed to prevent problems that have existed in ancient democracies. Democracy is not a new concept.
Our particular republic is unique because of the types of restrictions on the democracy, like preventing the majority from censoring the minority. "Democratic Republic" is merely the name we like to give to our particular republic because it employs some principles of democracy, like electing representatives in government, and a chance to indirectly elect the president. But clearly it rejects the overall democratic philosophy that the majority is right. The most obvious examples that our republic rejects democracy is that judges are not democratically elected, and the accused are not democratically convicted.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Do licenses try to screw those who accept it over? Licenses mostly screw people who violate it over.
Commercial software licenses typically disallow a substantial range of actions which would otherwise be permitted by law (copyright and otherwise). Some people would describe this as screwing over the acceptee -- and in several cases (such as licenses in which the licensor is given permission to arbitrarily modify the licensee's computer, to pick an extreme but increasingly common case), it's hard to argue that they're incorrect.
Plausible, but least likely.
He had lost 2 lawsuits already and has been ordered to pay costs on at least one.
The average lawsuit costs in the US this will bankrupt a maker of WallaceOS right away so he has to have some bigger sponsorship to be still alive.
Who is paying this guy's costs?
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/