Over twenty years ago I was a making killing, hand over fist, selling a Usenet news reading add-on for Emacs. Then those anti-trust bastards included some Lisp code which does that, and I went down the tubes.
I mean, what gave them the right, you know?
It's as if not only did they disrespect my sense of entitlement, but it's like they didn't even see it, in spite of its monstrous size.
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(?)
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
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?
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.
But this is about Google.
Google said in February that device makers “are free to install the apps
they choose, and consumers always have complete control over the apps on
their devices.”
Several device manufacturers that pre-install Yandex apps notified the
company in 2014 that they were “no longer able to pre-install Yandex
services,” such as Yandex’s search and map apps on Google’s Android devices,
prompting Yandex to make a complaint to the antitrust authorities. [1]
In order to install Google Play on their devices, device manufacturers are
required to preinstall the entire suite of Google GMS services, and set
Google as the default search. In addition to that, device manufacturers are
increasingly prohibited from installing any services from Google’s
competitors on their devices… The openness of Android is now in a thing of
the past.” [Yandex' claim] [2]
[2] http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/yandex-google-russia-antitr...
Microsoft's hardware (e.g. Surface Pro) is less locked down than the competition's version of the same (e.g. iPad). Why must ever topic devolve into Microsoft bashing?
I'm curious How a ruling like that gels with the fact that on an iPhone (the other half of the market) all services and apps are dictated by Apple and can not be altered, while on Android not only they can be but the whole OS is free, Yandex could have commissioned their own hardware like many others do and they curiously haven't complained about Apple.
Same goes for the search allegation,the argument there is that Google should feature results from other search engines on their own site! Which is mind Boggling, no one is convinced Facebook or twitter or anyone should include content from other website but somehow Google is different. Google isn't the network layer that one must go through it to interact with the web, they are no "gatekeeper" not technically or metaphorically yet somehow politicians are convinced they are.
This seems like field distortion to me that somehow regulator were sold on to (even excluding this Russian example).
Or any other custom android; just ask Samsung, Google pressurized them to drop their own ecosystem.
This is anticompetitive if you ask me.
And the US even found merit to investigate Google, before quietly burying the case.
The Russians are always trying to create and solidify a US-free sphere of influence. That goes for US companies, US NGOs, you name it.
Edit: actually, they'd only need their own app store if I understand the terms correctly.
Not to mention $10B is probably less than the amount Google alone has spent developing and promoting Android. Please explain how their direct competitor should be entitled to piggy back on that work for free.
Edit: apparently they even have their own 'Yandex Browser' based on Chromium. Shameless.
Source for this?
http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/russias-99-convi...
1. prohibit, bash, etc... foreign goods and services
2. ...
3. enjoy quality replacement by domestic manufacturers and providers.
right now the stage 1 is at full swing.
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.
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.)
Yes, I know there are commercial Linux distributions, but they're almost exclusively targeted towards corporate and server use.
"It's not just pressure. They outright cut you off. You cannot ship Google Androids and non-Google Androids. It's part of the MARA."
I think just having your own store is okay as long as you don't bundle their competitors and don't exclude google play and you are big enough to put some weight.
You're looking at the wrong monopoly!
'apple has a monopoly on the iphone'
'GM has a monopoly on cadillac'
'BMW has a monopoly on the 3-series'
Of course they have a 'monopoly' on android, android is their product. Android has captured 64%[0] of the smartphone market in russia, this is again not a monopoly. A monopoly would capture 100% of the market, thats the definition of a monopoly.
I'm eager to hear what market Google has captured 100% of, because its not search or smartphones
[0]http://www.statista.com/statistics/262174/market-share-held-...
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?)
Looks like that hardware market is not very competitive.
You can. You are not limited to specialty outfits as well, nor are you required to pay a lot for it, or any of the other numerous criteria you try to add on as well. Being able to buy a PC without paying for Windows or paying for an Apple product is incredibly easy for the average person today.
Nobody forced Google to release Android under open licenses and by doing so they certainly didn't get green light to abuse monopoly.
"I will open source my software and see that it only does me good" - that's not how it works.
However, Play Store is not open source or released under an open license so if you want to use Android to spread your crapware you don't get to complain that Google doesn't want to license you their app store. They have no moral ground to stand on.
Did they?