Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 03:02:08 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <dyson@iquest.net> To: brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass) Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The GPL and the Robinson-Patman Act Message-ID: <199902230802.DAA02845@y.dyson.net> In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990222155920.0404e9d0@mail.lariat.org> from Brett Glass at "Feb 22, 99 04:04:53 pm"
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Brett Glass said: > One concern I've always had about the GPL and the FSF is that they appear > to violate the Robinson-Patman Act. They make code free to users, free to > developers of GPLed software, and expensive or utterly unattainable to > developers of commercial software. Richard Stallman specifically states > that an effect of the GPL will be to remove software from the realm of > competition. > > Is this illegal price discrimination? Here's a copy of the relevant language: > .... RMS's lawyers are likely bigger than a reasonable size of us could pool together and afford to hire. I suspect that it would be a battle of lawyers, and since the world tends towards socialism and/or totalitarianism without vigilance and lots of effort, this would be a life-long cause. ..... What *will* happen, is that times will be less fat in the future, than they are now... People will end up doing less and less for free, and worry more about feeding their kids, parents, and maybe themselves. At that point, the gratis programming efforts will diminish, and the jobless programmers (if it ever happens) will wish that there is more code under the BSD license, and avoid anything that they can't profit on based upon their skills... Either that, they'll be picking fruit in the fields... :-(. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dyson@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdyson@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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