RE: tlug: RMS and Amazon...

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

Adrian Havill <havill@example.com> wrote,

> I posed the theoretical question that what if an evil company had so much
> money it decided to intentionally violate the GPL on a grand scale, on the
> theory that it could overwhelm the resources of the FSF in legal fees even
> though it  may lose the cases in the end-- "the Chinese army" tactic. Ney
> said that if such an event ever occurred, he was confident that the
> community would rally to support it. Hmmmm.

Sure, it is difficult to say how effective the community is,
but I wouldn't underestimate it.  It has, by now, IMO a
rather strong influence on computer-related journalism and
can hurt the public image of a company enormously.
Furthermore, such a fundamental attack would probably be
perceived as dangerous by a growing number of companies who
depend on open source code (like TurboLinux ;-) and I am
sure they would do everything they can to protect their
revenues.  All in all, I don't see how an evil company can
get through all of this with an advantage in the end - and
why shouldn't they do it otherwise?  Software patents are
_much_ more dangerous IMHO than such a scenario (and we
already have them).

Manuel
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