Il mer, 2002-03-20 alle 18:16, Tomasz Wegrzanowski ha scritto:
On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 06:10:15PM +0100, Giovanni Biscuolo wrote:
Il mer, 2002-03-20 alle 14:57, Claus F?rber ha scritto:
Jan Wildeboer jan.wildeboer@gmx.de schrieb/wrote:
Interesting - Free software can violate antitrust laws? Can you construct a theoretical example? Just curious :-)
Consider this: Apache changes the licence to GPL. As Apache has a large market share, 3rd party vendors for WWW server solutions would have to make their products compatible with Apache.
However, taken the GPL literally, they could not, for example, write a plugin like mod_fancy_shopping_solution and release that under a proprietary licence.
So proprietary software vendors could not access that market, giving an competive advantage to Open Source software vendors.
They could use a proprietary web server, it's their choice.
Is this a joke?
Ciao.
No, this isn't a joke.
Oh, so I hoped.
Antitrust law applies to anyone who is dominant on a market,
[...]
Antitrust laws applies to companies, not to software.
In the above example Apache web server is free software available to anyone under the Apache Software License, Version 1.1. Firthermore, The Apache Software Foundation exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Apache open-source software projects. The Apache Software Foundation is a membership-based, non-profit corporation.
The very same is for all free software, since it is available to *anyone* (even to competitors) under the terms of a free software license.
... yes, it *was* a joke ;-)
Ciao.