First, a parable: The local supermarket sells shiitake mushrooms for $5.00 per ounce. About a mile down the road there is an ethnic market that sells the same kind of mushrooms for $5.00 per *pound*.
You might have been told in high school that this kind of thing can never happen in an efficient market. Well ... it turns out that the mushroom market is not efficient. You might say wow, that's a huge markup. I agree, it's a huge markup. On the other hand, huge markups are perfectly legal. There is nothing anybody can do about it, except maybe to shop around. Other examples abound. Year after year, people buy "breakfast cereal" despite the amazingly high markup. In early 1976, a Mattel vice president compared a game I had written to a Pet Rock. He meant it as the highest compliment, referring to something that millions of people would gladly buy, even though there was obviously a high markup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock On 03/17/2010 08:07 AM, Patrice Poly wrote: > I think what this person(s) do here is *almost* legal. I am not a lawyer, and I will not opine as to whether any particular thing is legal, but we certainly must consider the hypothesis that what FPS is doing is legal. It's a plausible hypothesis. Is FPS making money off of GPL software? Yes ... but that is expressly permitted by the GPL subject to some not-very-onerous conditions. We can insist that FPS strictly uphold the conditions, but that will not stop FPS from doing the things that list members find most distasteful. Is FPS charging a huge markup? Yes, definitely ... but there is nothing illegal about that. Some of the suggestions offered in this forum for trying to prevent that would violate the letter and spirit of the GPL. Loosely speaking, the point of the GPL is to prevent people -- including us -- from modifying GPL software so as to make it non-GPL. Is FPS guilty of plagiarism? Yes, definitely ... but this is not illegal, either. It is IMHO morally reprehensible, but it is permitted by the GPL. In another context, if you want to disallow plagiarism, you should use a Creative Commons / attribution license or some such. The GPL was designed by and for people who thought the anti-plagiarism provisions of the BSD license were too much trouble. In the context of FG, short of starting over and rewriting FG from scratch, I cannot imagine any way of "porting" FG to a more- restrictive license. ========== So, what *can* be done? For starters, in this situation as in so many others, sunlight is an excellent disinfectant. If the FPS guy is touting his wares in any open forum, you can speak up in that forum, early and often, so that buyers know where to go for the cheapest and most up-to-date FG versions. Don't get mad, just get the facts out. You can even go so far as to write articles for the various PC simulator magazines. This includes articles announcing the latest version of FG ... and also perhaps articles doing a review, comparing price and features, of the various offerings. I reckon somebody who increases the price without increasing the features would not fare well in such a comparison. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
