4 thoughts on “part two of Deep Fried Bytes podcast up”

  1. LOL at the iTunes antitrust paper example, but only because it was my A paper; I doubt anyone else finds it so funny. FWIW, I don’t think the presence of illegal means of breaking the tie gets you off the hook, b/c it’s the conduct, not the effect, that matters. It’s still a Section 1 violation, even if you suck at it.

  2. Really enjoyed this discussion, thanks for posting it.
    One of the hosts was asking why a proprietary software company would ever use GPL’ed code instead of a more permissive license. You touched on the answer when you mentioned Novell and Red Hat, but the point wasn’t clearly made. They didn’t get it. The point that was missed is the benefit of shared development cost to the proprietary software companies. Apple’s use of Samba and Webkit was brought up as being good moves, which contradicts the assertion that using GPL’ed infrastructure is a dumb business move. Apple will not have to worry about spending millions of dollars of development cost keeping Samba compatible with the next version of Windows. However if one part of Samba is lacking in an area important to Apple, they can invest some work into fixing it.
    They can contribute as much or as little as they want, according to their overall OS goals. There is a good business case for using established GPL’ed infrastructure and contributing your changes back. If you do it properly you are getting a lot of high quality software development for free in a way that just doesn’t happen by forking code from a permissive license. On the other hand, if you take permissively licensed code and make it your own, you are adding to your future maintenance burden and throwing away the future free development. You should point out that there are plenty of innovative young companies that are successfully
    leveraging this strategy and it really is helping them gain a competitive advantage over others that haven’t figured this out. There are companies using GPL’ed technology as far up the stack as Gnome and it is HELPING their bottom line. Talk about these companies.
    I think you could make a theoretical case where Apple could use Linux as the base, and still provide a unique customer value. If you really think about it couldn’t Apple use a GPL’ed toolkit without it having any negative effect on Mac sales? And could this possibly actually benefit them by allowing spend less money on plumbing and tools, and more on higher level user experience stuff? I’m not saying they should do that, I’m just saying it’s not implausible, not dumb, not business suicide. Help people wrap there minds around this. TomTom, Garmin, Nokia strategies are good fodder for explaining this.

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