Re: Economics and the GPL ... etc

"Deven T. Corzine" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Antitrust laws exist to make the marketplace fair to the CUSTOMER (the public),
> not the vendor...

well, not quite that simple.  The govt will act on behalf of the public, but vendors
can collect damages from it (witness the suits against M$ after the trial)
 
> > > A good general rule for "fairness" is that you treat people equally.
> > [...]
> > >How can you be fair by discriminating?
> 
> Because laws are (theoretically) made for the benefit of everyone -- in the
> public interest.  This means that things that may seem unfair with respect
> to private interests (e.g. antitrust law, eventual expiration of copyright,
> etc.) exist for the benefit of the public, to keep private interests from
> exploiting the public mercilessly.

Actually, I don't necessarily equate your examples here of being unfair as
the restrictions on everyone.  Antitrust should really be handled separately,
as it only applies to relatively large companies (and not people) and addresses
corporate misbehavior.  


> Subject: RE: GPL vs. sweatshops (was Re: Bias)
> Competition often spurs greater efforts.  (Consider KDE and GNOME.)  Maybe
> the GPL helps eliminate competition, but is that necessarily a good thing?
> Once the competition is gone, so is the competitive impetus to improve the
> code, which can lead to stagnation.  Does the GPL shoot itself in the foot
> by eliminating competition?

Competition is almost always a good thing.  One only has to look to find examples
of great progress caused by competition: space race.  kde/gnome.  the genome project.
netscape/IE (if it weren't for the anticompetitive M$ behavior).  Public (as in
non-governmental) items that generally discourages competition is fundamentally
flawed IMHO.
 
> > well, apache didn't start off well-establisted (though it did grow out of
> > the NCSA project).   Though I think it's fair to say that for many projects,
> > the choice of X11 or GPL wouldn't make any noticable difference.
> 
> The NCSA httpd server was originally funded by public money.  Later, Apache
> developed as an underground activity of webmasters looking to improve on
> the NCSA httpd server -- by the time management generally became aware of
> it, the Apache project was well-established and already becoming dominant.

well, it was a little more complicated than that, as NCSA was changing their
license for the webserver at the time, if I remember correctly.  The effect
was probably the same as the BSD licensing problem that spawned linux.  

> Do you really think that most companies would have been willing to allow
> NCSA httpd improvements to be released if they thought of that work as
> strategic?  

uh, bad example as apache is not a copyleft license. 

> More likely we would have seen that work incorporated into
> proprietary NCSA httpd derivatives.  However, once Apache was established,
> it was too late -- the public project was moving too fast to compete with.

regardless, the licensing here (apache) didn't seem to slow it down noticably.
 


> Subject: Re: Funding software development?

> But I never mentioned Gangplank in this conversation; what made you go
> searching for it?  (After all, it's certainly not a well-known project!)

based from an RPI package, eh?   ooooo that brings back chilly memories ;)
 

-r