GPL and Economics (was Re: GPL vs. sweatshops (was Re: Bias))

"Roger Fujii" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Matt Seitz <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Yes, I do believe that the profit incentive is important and beneficial. 
But
> > it is not so sacred that we must ban anything and everything that threatens
a
> > company's profits.
> 
> This makes the assumption that GPL is "anything and everything".  

Not at all.  What I am saying is that the argument that xGPL code hurts a
company's profits is not automatically a sufficient reason to reject the xGPL. 
So the argument that Wine should not be xGPL simply because it will hurt
competing products' profits is not automatically a sufficient reason for Wine
to reject an xGPL license.

> > On the one
> > had, allowing cheaper imports can benefit domestic consumers and foreign
> > workers, while forcing domestic producers to be more competitive.  For
example,
> > think how Japanese imports forced American car manufacturers to improve.  
>> 
> But using this analogy for the GPL, if you used *any* Japanese part for a
domestic
> car, you had to buy 100% of your parts from Japan.  *THIS* is the problem.

Why is that a problem?  Why shouldn't Toyota be able to tell Ford that if Ford
wants to buy parts from Toyota then Ford must buy all their parts from Toyota? 
Toyota has no obligation to sell parts to Ford.  Unless Toyota has a monopoly
on car parts, that seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate business tactic for
Toyota.  Likewise, I don't see how a xGPL project like Wine is wrong to say
that if one wants to create a work derived from the xGPL code then one must
release the derived work back to the public.

> Competition is one thing.  Unfair competition (dumping) is another.  

I agree that dumping can be an anticompetitive act that should be limited or
prohibited in the interest of maintaining a competitive marketplace.  But
simply offering a good or service at a lower price than one's competitors is
not necessarily dumping.

Dumping is an act committed by a dominant player primarily in an attempt to
drive substatially less well funded competitors out of business.  If an xGPL
project were a dominant player, with substantially more resources than any
competitior, then one could compare the xGPL to dumping.  I agree that if this
ever becomes the case, then there would be a need for corrective action.    

So, if Wine ever became overwhelmingly dominant over and better funded than its
competitors, I could see the argument made that Wine's xGPL license constituted
unfair dumping.  Until that time, I don't see an xGPL Wine as constituting
dumping.

> In the software arena, while you can never ban free (X11) software for free
speech
> reasons, it allows itself to be used as foundations for other things, which
mitigates
> the dumping effect.  GPL does not allow this, which aggravates the dumping
effect.

I agree, there is the potential for the xGPL to become a coercive,
anticompetitive tool, but only if an xGPL project becomes an effective
monopoly.  Short of that, the xGPL is a legitimate competitive tool.

I believe that requiring all code become immediately available to competitors
is too great a concession to business interests.  Instead, I prefer a more
moderate approach that balances the rights of the code authors to set their own
licensing terms and the desire for a competitive market.  Limiting the duration
of the xGPL terms seems to me to be an appropriate balancing of these
interests.  And it seems to me that a fair way to do that would be to limit the
duration of copyright, so that both GPL and proprietary developers would be
forced to give their code to each other after a certain length of time.


=====
Sincerely,
Matt Seitz

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com