[click170]

I'm assuming this is a sarcastic post.

It's an interesting thought experiment to extrapolate antitrust ideas onto free software.

If Linux grew big enough could it attract antitrust lawsuits despite not being the product of any single company?

My first impression was to draw the line at organizations that make money, but that leaves the possibility for free software growing so big as to hinder progress, which isn't necessarily beneficial for the community either.

Discuss(?)

[kazinator]

> I'm assuming this is a sarcastic post.

More like satirical.

I just returned to this tab 56 minutes after the fact, and wanted to delete the comment, but when I clicked the delete link, "1 point" flipped to "13 points". :)

My point is, why is something like GNU Emacs or GNU/Linux above anti-trust with regard to bundling? Suppose that GNU/Linux had only one distribution, and it was so popular that it was on 99% of the world's desktops. There wouldn't be any anti-trust hoopla regarding that distribution having a preferred web browser, no matter how deeply integrated.

Morally, the users of this platform would be just as locked in as users of Windows and IE. (Or Google Android and some Google Service app or what have you).

Anti-trust somehow only picks targets from which it can squeeze money. That's what it's about, not any morality of the situation or what is good for consumers. Those are just pretexts.

(The very fact that Russia is eagerly aping this concept speaks volumes).

Auntie Ayn on anti-trust laws: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/antitrust_laws.html

[splawn]

>Suppose that GNU/Linux had only one distribution, and it was so popular that it was on 99% of the world's desktops. There wouldn't be any anti-trust hoopla regarding that distribution having a preferred web browser, no matter how deeply integrated.

Assuming that in this alternate world GNU/Linux wasn't malleable (either because its not open source or for some other reason I am not able to think of). I think there would be anti-trust "hoopla".

For example... Think of the negative response everyone had back when ubuntu started sending amazon data... I changed distros. I don't think just because a system is based in GNU/Linux means that it is automatically sainted.

[cannabis_sam]

>Suppose that GNU/Linux had only one distribution

This is like saying "suppose the US was a totalitarian dictatorship". It might be an interesting thought experiment, but it ignores reality to the point of being utterly useless in any practical sense. GNU/Linux is based around the idea of free software, which by it's very definition make it impossible to restrict it to one distribution. (This is not to say that the US will never become a totalitarian dictatorship, but rather that despite the huge flaws of the US political system, the features of totalitarianism are antithetical to the ideological basis of the current US political system.)

>Anti-trust somehow only picks targets from which it can squeeze money. That's what it's about, not any morality of the situation or what is good for consumers. Those are just pretexts.

Even if you assume there is a correlation between anti-trust litigation and the resources of the companies exposed to this kind of litigation, that alone does not prove malice on the part of the government. The actual reason anti-trust litigation hits companies with money is that it's designed to fight monopolies . How many monopolies are going bankrupt, and how many of those who do, need government intervention to limit their damage on the overall economy...?

>The very fact that Russia is eagerly aping this concept speaks volumes.

It really doesn't. Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, and has been since before the October revolution. That they're jumping on western concepts and adapting them to suit their need of political control doesn't say anything about the value of the ideas they're corrupting.

>Auntie Ayn on anti-trust laws: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/antitrust_laws.html

Let's consider a quote from your link: "Under the Antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does." This is trivially false since companies (i.e. people who have gone into business) have been cleared of antitrust charges. It's also an an excellent example of Ayn Rand's simplistic, and in my opinion, childish excuse for proper reasoning and logic. (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to refute the rest of Ayn Rand's quotes in the article, in the hopes that it might cure some people of their objectivism.)

[justinlardinois]

I think the difference is that no one is really making money off desktop Linux. How can you argue monopoly when your "competitor" isn't even a business?

Yes, I know there are commercial Linux distributions, but they're almost exclusively targeted towards corporate and server use.

[belorn]

Looking at antitrust law I can't find a single phrase that would cover a scenario with free software. Could the linux project sell products at a loss? The linux project do not actually sell anything beyond brand merchandise (and they got state approved monopoly on that). People have argued (but never in court) that giving away software is price dumping but since you don't incur a marginal loss it do not match any current law that I have seen.

Can the linux project do exclusive dealing? I guess one could argue that the linux project did buy exclusively buy from BitKeeper, but defining that as an "supplier" seems to stretch the definition beyond nonrecognition.

Free software and open source licenses specifically forbids Refusal to deal, price fixing, and tied offering. You can't violate the law here without also infringing people's copyright.

Can linux project divide territories with other kernel projects? In theory they could do so if they offered support contracts but not by simply producing software. What would define a territory in the context of publicly offering free software to anyone?

[jkyle]

> that leaves the possibility for free software growing so big as to hinder progress

How would that happen, exactly? Particularly with the GPL. If an author (company or otherwise) distributes their work, they're required to also provide the source for that work.

Thus, no author distributes their GPL'd software with an expectation that they will make a profit by keeping others from using that code.

So whether the main project continues to use their code or replaces it with other code of comparable functionality is irrelevant. In fact, most entities who buy into Linux do so (in part) to offload the maintenance expenses associated with that code base. So if the community picks it up, win. If the community does not, you 'break even' as you're in the same position of maintaining the code base internally as you would would have been if you'd not open sourced it in the first place.

[kazinator]

> How would that happen, exactly? Particularly with the GPL. If an author (company or otherwise) distributes their work, they're required to also provide the source for that work.

How that could happen is: Imagine in a world in which a free, open-source operating system is immensely popular, installed on most desktops, devices, servers and embedded systems. Suppose the system's distro ships bundled with some applications (also perfectly open-sourced).

If it is difficult to compete with those applications, how does it matter that they are open source?

Sure, you can make a fork of the distro which is unbundled, making it easier to replace appliactions. But, oops, hardware vendors don't want to ship the forked distro for whatever reasons. They say, "we install the image that 99% of the world uses. We don't charge anything extra; if you want something else, wipe the HD/flash and do a complete reinstall."

In this hypothetical world, would governments step in with anti-trust litigation? (Against what?)

For extra confusion points, let's add signing: suppose you can't even add an application to the distro if it doesn't have an approved signature from the upstream. (Isn't that essesentially Firefox started with add-ons?)

[marcosdumay]

> Sure, you can make a fork of the distro which is unbundled, making it easier to replace appliactions. But, oops, hardware vendors don't want to ship the forked distro for whatever reasons.

Looks like that hardware market is not very competitive.

[kazinator]

Or maybe it's so competitive, working on such thin margins, that they don't want to put resources into forked distros.

[ams6110]

> It's an interesting thought experiment to extrapolate antitrust ideas onto free software.

But this is about Google.

[ocdtrekkie]

Exactly, this isn't about Android, the open source OS, this is about the Play Store, Google's proprietary service, and the secretive contracts Google mandates surrounding it.