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From: | amicus_curious |
Subject: | Re: US court says software is owned, not licensed |
Date: | Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:39:00 -0400 |
"David Kastrup" <dak@gnu.org> wrote in message 87skdniz1r.fsf@lola.goethe.zz">news:87skdniz1r.fsf@lola.goethe.zz...
Well, you seem to have a unique view of market value which most everyone else agees to be the amount of money spent by consumers to obtain products that comprise the market. I suppose that, if you need to find some way to justify your original comment, you could use that analysis to save face, but you would be exposing an alternate shortness of knowledge. Which is better for you? Your view is analogous to claiming that the title of biggest crap game in town goes to the table with the largest bank rather than to the one with the most money wagered. It is a wrong view."amicus_curious" <acdc@sti.net> writes:"David Kastrup" <dak@gnu.org> wrote in message 87pr8s4t7b.fsf@lola.goethe.zz">news:87pr8s4t7b.fsf@lola.goethe.zz...Rjack <user@example.net> writes:David Kastrup wrote:He made the rather audacious and totally unsupported statement that the "GPL software market is worth billions by now" and he ducks and runs from the challenge that his notion is simply false.Huh? There was no challenge. If there had been, it would have been easy to counter. RedHat's market capitalization is 5.29billion at the moment, their main product is RedHat Linux and an estimated 80% (including the kernel) of any Linux distribution is under the GPL.Using the market cap of a producer to suggest the value to the market is kind of a reach.Hm? It is the amount of money the investors find worth keeping in a company. If a single company focused on GPL products already has more than 5 billions, it is certainly not unsubstantiated to talk about a market worth billions. Unless you are in complete denial mode.
I have not been proven wrong at all. You have merely proven your lack of understanding of the meaning of market value. Even so, since you offer the market cap of Red Hat as substantiation of the "market value of GPL software" so to speak, you have to agree that the reason for the assertion in the first place was to claim that the GPL was of substance. Changing the metric for Red Hat, though, changes it for all non-GPL software as well and the GPL measure is still trivial and inconsequential relative to the measure of the non-GPL software. So your assertion remains unproven.Using the same logic, the market value of Windows and Windows software is some 240 billion by contrast.I haven't looked. So what? That was not under debate. Is there a particular reason you feel like changing the topic whenever you have been proven wrong?
That is indeed humorous! Sun, having made an effort to re-invent itself, at least in image, and failed is now offered as an "open source" company? I suppose that its attempt to proprietize MySQL will be branded as its becoming a "company centered on GPL software" as well. Then the offer by Oracle to purchase Sun makes Oracle a similar company? No wonder Steve Ballmer suggested that GPL was a "cancer"! You have shown that he is right.No other company dealing with open source software as a defining charactersitic even comes close to Red Hat,Last time I looked, Sun defined itself as an open source company, and it is slated to become part of Oracle. Both not exactly small companies.
A minute amount of IBM's business deals with open source software and in reality nothing about its business that differentiates it from its competition relies on open source. Further, the discussion was not about "open source" but rather about the GPL. Do you find the GPL hard to defend? BTW, I looked up TeX and such and it appears, among other things, to not be a GPL licensed software product. Why not?so one could safely say that the combined market caps of proprietay software companies focused on Windows, which would necessarily include hunks of Oracle, Symantec, IBM, Intuit, and others, is a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the GPL can muster, making it a rather small potato.Cough, cough. Hunks of Oracle, IBM and others are focused on Open Source (IBM has invested a few billions into Open Source by now according to their own statements, so IBM alone would also likely support my statement). Is there a particular reason you only want to count a single company for the GPL tally (and dismiss that this single company would already suffice for my statement), yet list a number of companies (who tend to also invest in the GPL market) on the side of Windows, even though a comparison was never the topic?
My grip is fine. It is yours that has slipped. You are the one who seems confused as to how market value is calculated. Do you not believe in the standard definitions? You are also the one who seems confused by OSS vs FOSS and the GPL vs other sorts of open source licenses. I know that you are a devoted participant in the TeX world, whatever the situation there, but you can do that without worrying about What Microsoft does in its own sphere.Get a grip. Try to remember what you tried accusing me of and try arguing a bit more coherently. You don't look particularly well if you both lose sight of your argument _and_ employ conflicting standards while arguing something else altogether.
GPL software, in your analogy, would be more akin to "mulberry juice" or something like it that needs to be made at home and not generally available in supermarkets. Linux itself could qualify as the analog of perhaps "prune juice" which appears on store shelves, but only barely.The statement concerned the "GPL software" market (i.e. proprietary vs. non-proprietary) software. It is a category mistake to conflate "software" market with "software services" market.Huh? Since when? It would appear you are redefining "software market" as "licensing fee collection market" in order to carry your argument. But that's just stupid. Licensing fee collection is not even part of a software engineer's job description.But it is a very significant part of the value of software being sold in commerce.Not with GPL software. And so it is simply disingenuous to define "market" as something excluding the GPL market. It is like saying that the majority of beverages is carbonated, and then measuring the beverage market in terms of carbon dioxide. Of course you'll arrive at the conclusion that there is no significant market value for orange juice.
Well I find it difficult to achieve your level, of course, but I would claim that, absent Linux per se, Red Hat could be in the same business doing the same things and be focused on freeBSD Unix. Or the GPL could be revoked and Red Hat would continue to be in the same business doing the same thing as before. Indeed, one could make a case that the failure of Red Hat to adopt the GPL v3 in its licensing is indicative of that very same thing.As noted, the source of Red Hat's profits are the support activities which are dependent on the existence of the GPL software in Linux, but are distinctly separate and not particularly open at that. You have to pay to play with Red Hat.Uh yes. We were talking about _market_ value of GPL software business. Now you want to exclude everything for which one has to pay. How much more stupid can you get?
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