Re: questions I would like to have seen...

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Re: questions I would like to have seen...
by Anton Velev on Thursday 15/Apr/2004, @13:08

oh, not again...

Read some articles about Adam Smith and Free Market.

The current state of modern society seems to prove that the Free Market (commercial) is the best working model. (when saying 'market' I mean the economy being it global or local)
However some people (rms) seem to discover that capitalism, is not the best model and try to make it more 'social'. (I agree that Free Market may not be perfect, but still is the proven working model)

Now about the problem: one of the biggest problems of the Free Market is monopoly because the key factor for improvment in free market economy is the commercial competition. And monopoly is the opposite of competition.

If we believe that GPL really destroys one monopoly (well known empire), there still remains the question how would GPL help the competition to improve. Moreover since IT industry requires standartization, seems that it's a normal trend of adpotion of one monopoly solution for a given purpose (as for example current state is that Apache is widely adopted as "standart" solution for webserver, and Windows is widely adopted as a "standart" solution for desktop). However organizations like w3c try to help with the standarts and make possible actual competition of differrent parties when implementing the standarts.

The reason I don't believe GPL is the right solution is because I am strongly convinced that GPL eliminates the competition. Again if we believe GPL will ever destroy all other software and everything becomes GPL do you think there will be competition? You probably can show me the example of GTK vs Qt saga (but this is LGPL vs GPL issue). To me more exact I must add the facts that GPL:
- can be forked
- you cannot sell your closed-source feture (to GPL software)
Make conclusions yourself. But you cannot miss the fact that GPL encourages GPL monoploly. Of course it would sound great if spelled like "GPL powers the innovation by uniting the GPL developers", but here is what makes me feel we have a problem - again instead of competing parties that try to make it better and better.

I agree that if there were >10 competing Qt like companies (selling commercial licenses only) and there was no Microsoft that would be better for the Free Market, but the current state of the world makes in impossible. (here is where GPL people find GPL very useful)

But wouldn't it be better (having in mind the current state of the world) for the Free Market if there was a truly open (no monopoly) and standarts compilant platform. (by "truly open" I mean like BSD, X, Apache and MIT licenses) Then every company out there could add a feature and sell it - like Apple does but in a very large scale. With GPL this will be impossible, except if the company that created the GPL software is selling the additional features.

To help you better understand my opinion will show you this formula:
free market = competition != GPL

If you can convince me that GPL not only destroys the empire but also helps and encourages the competition then probably I may agree that GPL is the right model.

Related Links

·   Articles on Interviews
·   Also by Anton Velev
·   Contact author

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Re: questions I would like to have seen...
by LuckySandal on Thursday 15/Apr/2004, @15:07

"To me more exact I must add the facts that GPL:
- can be forked
- you cannot sell your closed-source feture (to GPL software)"

A company may choose to to release a library simultaneously under GPL and a commercial license. You may create GPL software based on the library, or you can pay a fee to release closed-source software based upon the commercially-licensed version. This is the case with Qt on Linux. Companies are able to profit and thus compete while using GPL by including an additional licensing option.

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