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Economic interest in GPL ?Economic interest in GPL ?Posted Aug 21, 2008 9:50 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (guest, #5474)In reply to: Economic interest in GPL ? by gdt Parent article: Why the JMRI decision matters
Actually I think the court missed the main point of economic interest in free software which is the fact that it is an alternative to licensing expensive commercial software. How much would it have cost Lexmark to write their own operating system for their printers? Billions probably. Or to license something like WinCE or QNX? Millions? How much would it have cost the people who stole the JMRI software to write those decoder definition files instead of stealing them? I don't know but certainly some significant chunk of programmer time and hence money. So for companies to claim that this is just some stuff that they got for free off a website and they can do what they want with it because it has no value is extremely disingenuous. Rich.
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