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7th Circuit Dismisses Appeal of GPL Open Source Antitrust Suit
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has issued an opinion in which Judge Easterbrook declares, "[t]he GPL [General Public License] and open-source have nothing to fear from the antitrust laws." Plaintiff Daniel Wallace filed an antitrust suit against IBM, Red Hat and Novell, arguing that those companies had conspired to eliminate competition in the operating system market by making the operating system Linux freely available under the GPL. The decision affirmed an Indiana federal court (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana) decision dismissing the case, finding the plaintiff had suffered no antitrust injury.
The decision dismissed Wallace’s legal theory as “faulty substantively” for failing to contend that making software available under the GPL would lead to monopoly pricing. In support, Judge Easterbrook cited several examples of market domination by proprietary software over open source alternatives, including Microsoft Windows/Apple OS X/Sun Solaris over Linux, Adobe Photoshop over Gimp, and even the use of LEXIS and Westlaw over freely available court-published works.
For a copy of the decision, visit:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/7th/062454p.pdf