Re: Hey Terekhov: Wallace lost. Who'd guess.... ;)

[David Kastrup]

Alexander Terekhov <terekhov@web.de> writes:

> David Kastrup wrote:
>> 
>> richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) writes:
>> 
>> > In article <85iro3liug.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>, David Kastrup
>> > <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
>> >
>> >>> The anticompetitive nature of the GNU GPL is no-brainer.
>> >
>> >>That must explain why there is _lots_ of competition in the Linux
>> >>market.
>> >
>> > Surely the claim must be that it is damaging to competition in the
>> > market for operating systems as a whole, rather than within the
>> > Linux market itself?
>> 
>> But the Linux market is not separate from the operating systems
>> market.  Linux is damaging to _competitors_ in the market for
>> operating systems, because it opens wide the possibilities for
>> _competition_. 
>
> And once again you conflate the market under attack by the copyleft
> conspiracy with its ancillary markets.

Nothing but the "ancillary market" is relevant here.  We are talking
about the business of selling operating systems, not of selling labor.
Wallace is free to sell his labor to whatever operating system vendor
wants to buy it.  But that's not what he wants.  He purports to want
to sell operating system copies himself, and exactly that is what you
call "ancillary market".

> Is it really that hard to grasp that those ancillary markets will
> function in exactly the same way (if not better) when copyleft is
> outlawed and Linux becomes non- copyleft free software?

You can't outlaw copyleft since it is simply a normal use of a
creator's copyright.  And those ancillary markets work better with
copyleft: exactly that is the problem for Wallace: he can't sell his
personal reinvention of the wheel because the market already has the
means to supply better ones on a sustainable basis.

>> But if those competitors find that the presence of Linux makes
>> their own products less attractive, they are free to revert to
>> selling Linux themselves
>
> Yeah, and "In time, due to its recursive nature, the GPL’s pool of
> price fixed intellectual property can grow to utterly destroy a
> targeted market." True.

Nonsense.  The market is thriving with hundreds of competitors and
everybody free to join.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum