Monday, May 22, 2006

Anti-GPL lawsuit fails again

Daniel Wallace, who believes that free and open source software are anti-competitive, or at least has been prepared to go to court (twice so far) to try and get a legal declaration to that effect, has lost again. That he has lost would seem to strike a blow for sanity at least at one intersection where technology meets the law. His argument has been that the price of free and open source software is so low that it makes it difficult for him to enter the market with more expensive software.

No seriously - that's his beef - and if we examine the Microsoft campaigns against open source and the content industry's campaigns against new technologies, their messages are pretty similar - 'OS is a virus,' 'you can't compete with pirates offering free content' etc. - it's just that Microsoft and the content industries have much more sophisticated PR operations than Mr Wallace. And they are much more effective at getting us to believe that white is black or vice versa.

In any case it is good to know that at least two judges seem to believe that selling decent software at low prices is not anti-competitive.

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