Open Source License Still Perfectly Legal

from the in-case-you-were-wondering dept

Mon, May 22nd 2006 1:18am — Mike Masnick

A year ago a guy who disliked open source software decided to file lawsuits against the GPL open source license, claiming it violated anti-trust law. His argument was that, since GPL software was available free, it involved predatory pricing that made it impossible for him to sell competing software for a fee. Apparently the man has never heard of Microsoft, which has done okay (last we checked) selling software that competed at times with GPL'd software. It wasn't surprising then, a few months ago that a judge tossed out the case against the Free Software Foundation, and even made the guy pay for FSF's legal fees. However, the same guy also filed a similar suit against IBM, Red Hat and Novell for predatory price fixing, which Slashdot notes has also been thrown out. This time, the judge pointed out that the guy didn't show any anticompetitive effects on the actual market -- pointing out that just because he couldn't compete, it didn't mean that the market was harmed: "Antitrust laws are for 'the protection of competition, not competitors.'"

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7 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 22 May 2006 @ 2:29am

I don't understand what he could possibly hope to gain from such a lawsuit. Even if he was able to run a (non-profit) organisation out of "business", that doesn't make the GPL go away. The software is still there, it will continue to be developed, and no lawsuit can stop it. DeCSS comes to mind as a great example of this. Sued and Cease/Desisted here and back and still a staple of the Linux desktop. GPL > Lawsuits
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Anonymous Coward, 22 May 2006 @ 2:37am

Sue the public domain
If this guy's argument holds, he should sue the Congress for creating the public domain and the Supreme Court for not copyrighting facts. Non-protection makes it difficult for him to compete against the public domain and the unprotected facts.
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Anonymous Coward, 22 May 2006 @ 9:39am

What a douche
You'd think he'd have learned after the first three failed lawsuits.
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anonymous coward, 22 May 2006 @ 10:01am

did i just read that a judge/court made the intelligent and insightful decision regarding a relatively obscure technology issue?

whoever the judge is here should be the next supreme court nominee.
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- Anonymous Coward, 22 May 2006 @ 10:48am
  
  Re:
  Ya, right, not in THIS country, under THIS administration.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 22 May 2006 @ 4:15pm
    
    Re: Re:
    Yes, because we all know that this administration is the enemy of all that is good and decent, and that noone with an (R) by their name could possibly support a judge who rendered this decision.
    
    Oh wait... Judge John D. Tinder, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, appointed in September 1987 by Ronald Regan
    
    (http://www.indianabarrister.com/archives/2005/09/).
    
    Go crawl back into your partisan Bush-bashing hole and leave the discussion to the adults.
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Gengis Kanhg, 22 May 2006 @ 11:01am

¿Montains violated anti-trust law?
I think the next step in the neoliberal philosophy is to claim that the water from montains and other sources "violated anti-trust law" againt "companies which sell bottles of water".
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