(OT) Re: GPL Sued For "Software Price Fixing"

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, May 04, 2005, Ian Stephen wrote:
>On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 00:08, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
>> It is an odd idea that making something open is price fixing. I think
>> that you could charge for your product that includes changes done to GPL
>> code, as long as you make the source available.
>> 
>> Will doctors now complain against free clinics? Or professionals against
>> volunteers in any field? 
>
>Some years back there were extra-curricular programs shut down in
>schools here because the parents who participated as volunteers were
>"non-union workers"!

Carroll Quigley, in his book ``Tragedy and Hope: a history of the world in
our time'' talked about the collusion between monopoly capital and monopoly
labor to profit at the expense of unorganized consumers.

Alan Greenspan, in an essay on monopoly published in the early 1960s made a
very strong argument that monopolies cannot exist without government
intervention to prevent competition (paid for by political supporters of
course :-).

Most computer software, other than totally horizontal applications like
spreadsheets and word processing programs, requires some expertise to
analyse the problems, and fit the software to the business applications.
This is where the money is to be made, not in peddling the packages
themselves.  Competent software developers and consultants survive by
solving their customer's problems over the long term, not in selling them a
package and walking away.  The open source model makes this easier by
having a much larger pool of developers solving problems which are then
available to everybody.  I spend my time fixing my customer's highest
priority problems, feeding these fixes back to the base packages.
Hopefully others do the same.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
UUCP:               camco!bill  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
URL: http://www.celestial.com/

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government
working for you.
                -- Will Rogers