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


From: David Kastrup
Subject: Re: Hey Terekhov: Wallace lost. Who'd guess.... ;)
Date: Fri, 19 May 2006 10:51:32 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Alexander Terekhov <terekhov@web.de> writes:

> David Kastrup wrote:
> [...]
>> > 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. 
>
> Only to you and other GNUtians. Wallace's case is not about ancillary 
> markets.
>  
>>                                                      We are talking
>> about the business of selling operating systems, not of selling labor.
>
> Wallace is talking about selling Intellectual Property.
>
>> Wallace is free to sell his labor to whatever operating system vendor
>> wants to buy it. 
>
> Sure he is free. But he wants to become a vendor of his SciBSD
> operating system and use some IP value based business model.

"IP value based business model" is waffling about things.  Just what
does he want to sell to whom?

Anyway, so he finds that thereis already a market of operating systems
where hundreds of people compete by virtue of a cooperative business
model, and he wants to have both cooperation and competition outlawed
in order to have a chance of marketing an inferior product which does
not yet exist?

Why should the court feel they have to accommodate his wishes for
anticompetitive measures?

>> 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".
>
> You again attempt to conflate. Think of it this way: Red Hat doesn't
> sell operating system copies.

Why should I?  That's just what they do, and it is one of their main
sources of income.  Then they have a number of kernel and compiler
developers in their portfolio producing "intellectual property", and
since that enables them to be a competent business partner, people buy
at RedHat.  If they stop being a competent business partner, people
are free to go elsewhere for their business, both for operating system
copies and support.  No vendor lockin.

That is being competitive.  And Wallace wants to have competition
removed in order to be able to market an inferior product.

>> > 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.
>
> It's far from normal.

It is completely within the scope of the law.  In fact, if you look at
a current Windows XP EULA where Microsoft reserves the right to
remotely destroy your computer without recompensation in the course of
making a mistake while crippling its software post-purchase (in order
to stop you from exercising your consumer rights with a legally
acquired copy of music or software, for example), then I call _that_
far from normal.  Very, very far from normal.

A license permitting you sharing code under conditions is rather
ordinary.  It is halfway between a permission to share without
conditions, and this (public domain) is the penultimate state of _all_
copyrightable material, even though the currently valid time durations
until this happens are ridiculous, particularly when concerning
software.

>> 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.
>
> Nonsense. Wallace case is not about ancillary markets to begin with,
> and his reuse of BSD and alike licensed code in SciBSD is hardly
> reinvention.

So he wants to capitalize on the work of others without contributing
back and sues against people who don't allow their work to get
accosted in that manner.

So it is not his own IP he wants to sell, but that of others which is
freely available to him, and he wants to prohibit people making stuff
freely available to others since this ruins his market.

Really, it takes a Terekhov to make an even more outrageously stupid
case than Wallace tried doing himself.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum


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