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--------- Thursday Does Open Source Software Violate Antitrust Laws? Wallace v. International Bus. Mach., 06-2454 (7th Cir., Nov. 9, 2006) This Seventh Circuit decision addresses an interesting issue at the intersection of intellectual property and antitrust law: does open source software violate federal antitrust law? Led by Linux, the OSS folks provide free software subject to a General Public License. The GPL allows users to distribute the software and make derivative works, but the GPL must carry over to any such works. The idealists of the OSS movement hope that one day, all software will be free and monopolistic companies like Microsoft will be out of business. Sounds like nirvana, right? Well, not to software engineers like Daniel Wallace. Wallace wants to create and profit from his own software, but he claims that companies using OSS (like IBM and Novell) are conspiring to keep innovators like him out of the market via their mandatory GPL licensing terms and their price fixing. How can any new entrants to the market hope to compete with a free product? So he sued under federal antitrust law. The district court dismissed the suit because Wallace is a producer, not a consumer. On appeal to the Seventh Circuit, the Court explains that producers like Wallace do have standing to bring antitrust claims. But the Court affirms on the merits. Writing for the Court, Judge Easterbrook derides Wallace's claims as simply silly. The opinion is a mere seven pages, but you can bet that every software company in the country will be paying close attention to this important decision. // posted by Robert Loblaw @ Thursday, November 09, 2006 0 comments links to this post --------- Oh poor EASTERBROOK. regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
