Daniel Wallace, who described himself as educated in the art and science of physics and computer programming and is representing himself, has launched the action in the US District Court in the Southern District of California and accused the FSF of artificially fixing software prices.
The Defendant… has entered into contacts and otherwise conspired and agreed with individual software authors and commercial distributors of commodity software products such as Red Hat Inc and Novell Inc to artificially fix the process charged for computer software programs, read the compliant.
It added that this was done through the GNU General Public License, which is used for multiple free and open source software projects, including the Linux operating system, and which Wallace described as an adhesion contract.
The rapid adoption of the GNU General Public License in schemes to deflate or eliminate the free market valuation of computer programs threatens to diminish or destroy the ability of the Defendant to earn future revenues in the career field of computer programming, it added.
The FSF’s executive director, Peter Brown, told ComputerWire that the non-profit organization was yet to actually receive Wallace’s complaint having recently moved offices, and that until it had seen the documentation it was not in a position to comment sensibly on the court case.
Other than that he is a resident of Hamilton County, North Carolina, little information is provided about Wallace in the complaint. However, the name will be known to readers of Linux news web site comment forums where Wallace – or someone using that name – has engaged in numerous heated debates with open source enthusiasts about the legality of GPL.
While a lot of software distributed until the GNU GPL is free of charge, this is not actually a mandate of the Free Software philosophy. Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can, it states. Free programs are sometimes distributed gratis, and sometimes for a substantial price. Often the same program is available in both ways from different places. The program is free regardless of the price, because users have freedom in using it.
