“[T]he GPL and open-source have nothing to fear from the antitrust laws,” writes The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit’s Judge Easterbrook, reports InternetCases.com. Plaintiff 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 Linux available at an “unbeatable” price (free) under the General Public License (“GPL”). The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana dismissed the case, finding the plaintiff had suffered no antitrust injury. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. “Although antitrust law serves the interests of consumers rather than producers, the Supreme Court has permitted producers to initiate predatory-pricing litigation,” Judge Easterbrook wrote in the November 9 decision. “This does not assist Wallace, however, because his legal theory is faulty substantively.”Attorney Evan Brown, writing for InternetCases.com, notes, “Perhaps most significantly, Wallace had not contended that software available under the GPL would lead to mononpoly prices in the future. The court observed the anomalous thinking behind any conclusion that it would, ‘when the GPL keeps price low forever and precludes the reduction of output that is essential to monopoly.'”InfoWorld’s Matt Asay writes in the Open Sources blog: Besides a weak understanding of the law, Wallace is unfortunately mired in the proprietary past. His economic reasoning actually resembles that of the proprietary software vendors today. They may actually be dumbfounded by Easterbrook’s reasoning. 🙂 But let me state it clearly for the record: open source does not mean you have a divine right to profit margins or revenues. It’s about freedom. The ability to make money from it is something you have to earn.Download a copy of the opinion of Wallace v. IBM., No. 06-2454, here (PDF). For more info on the case, see Internet Cases’ previous coverage. Technology Industry