Chicken-Little-Fil-A
The demise of the software industry is being greatly exaggerated.
Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
Call it serendipity, chance, or happenstance, but it’s odd that I’ve found two posts today that both claim open source software is torpedoing the software business.
The first, a suit filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, claims that the GNU General Public License (GPL) restrains trade “by way of a contract licensing scheme to artificially fix prices of computer software products” at zero. The plaintiff in the suit, Mr. Daniel Wallace, also claims that the GPL “denies[ him] an opportunity to earn future revenue in the field of computer programming,” and asks for injunctive relief. The defendants in the suite are the Free Software Foundation, Novell, Red Hat, and IBM.
The second, an opinion posted on the British Computer Society web site (
http://www.bcs.org/BCS/Products/publishing/itnow/OnlineArchive/sep05/itnowextra/memberview.htm), claims that open source is a “nightmare scenario of[ open source] at one extreme and Microsoft at the other, with nothing else in between.” The author, Stephen J. Marshall, ends with, “What we need[ is] government… assistance to combat the threat to the[ software] industry’s livelihood that[ open source] might pose…”
I don’t think Mr. Wallace’s case holds any merit. The GPL is not law — it’s a license, a contract voluntarily entered into by the licensor (the author) and licensee. And, after all, the GPL keeps software “free, as in speech,” not “free, as in beer.” There are plenty of examples of independent open source software vendors generating profit.
