Re: Economics and the GPL

** All views expressed here are my personal views, not my employer's **

Am Fre, 2002-06-07 um 16.13 schrieb Deven T. Corzine:

> The only problem with this idea is that the GPL isn't really "free market" 
> because it coerces the programmer into applying the GPL to other code that 
> might not have been licensed that way given a choice.  If the programmer 
> loses to right to choose the license on their own code, the market can 
> hardly be said to be "free".

Face it: the creators of the GPL didn't have the "free market" in mind. 
The meaning of "free" in "free market" is completely different from
the GPL's definition of "free". The GPL was never meant to be a means
for helping the "free market".

On the contrary, when the GPL was designed, the "free market" had lead
to a situation where almost all software was licensed in a way that left
no freedom at all for the licensee. Take your time to read your MS word
license (or whatever other commercial software you have) again and
realize what "freedom" this license grants you. Often you are not even
allowed to make a backup copy, let alone share the software with
friends, improve it, ... Compare that with the GPL. It grants you
basically everything, except that you are not allowed to withdraw the 
freedom you enjoy from others.

> Sure, the programmer can avoid using any GPL code at all, but that puts him 
> at a disadvantage against a competitor who can draw on that code.

That's right, and that was the intention. Of course the competitor needs
to GPL his code, and you'd obviously regard that as a disadvantage for
him.

Now your programmer can probably find a commercial library that suits
his needs, and use it instead of the GPL library. He will have to pay
for it, pay even more for a development kit that allows him to compile
and link against it, and probably when he distributes his product will
have to pay for run-time licenses for his customers again. The vendor of
the library may decide at some time that he'd like to charge a 10 times
higher run-time license. This is likely to happen when the programmer
has finished his product and is at a stage where switching to another,
cheaper library would cost him a two-year delay, and he'll stick with
the vendor.

So that library will force him to use a commercial license unless he
want to go bankrupt, right? More than that, it will dictate a minimum
price tag he needs to charge. But you, Deven, would probably think that
guy enjoys more freedom than his poor competitor who finds himself in
the chains of the GPL. After all, he still has the freedom to make his
product so expensive that he has a margin despite his costs.

Hey, you may want to checkout those commercial competitors of wine:
MainWin and Wind/U. Great software! Have you ever asked yourself why
Wine seems to be more popular for porting software than these?

> This can hardly be claimed as "free market" dynamics.

No, it cannot. Repeat: "free software" and "free market" are two
fundamentally different concepts. That doesn't mean they can't go
together.

> yet a GPL monopoly could potentially 
> impair the free market just as much as Microsoft's monopoly does today...

Are you aware of the fact that it is possible to sell proprietary
software to run on GPL-dominated systems such as Linux? Have you any
reason to believe that this won't be possible any more in the future?
It just has to be software that people find worth paying for (or better:
to accept a non-free license for). I sincerely hope that soon nobody
will consider operating systems, word processors, web browsers, and
spreadsheet programs worth paying for. There is plenty of room for
specialized software, though, that won't become public domain that fast.

Actually, the situation won't differ that much from the one we have now,
because unless your name is Gates you already cannot make money by
selling operating systems, word processors, and spreadsheets.

** All views expressed here are my personal views, not my employer's **

Martin

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Martin Wilck                Phone: +49 5251 8 15113
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