Daniel Wallace, a North Carolina resident with twenty years of experience in computer automation in industry according to his motion for summary judgment, sued the Free Software Foundation in May, accusing the organization of restraint of trade under the Sherman Act, the federal antitrust law.
Wallace argued that the GNU GPL, which is used for multiple free and open source software projects, has been used by the FSF to deflate or eliminate the free market valuation of computer programs, threatening his ability to earn future revenue from computer programming.
In response the FSF has asked the US District Court in the Southern District of Indiana to dismiss Wallace’s complaint on the grounds that it fails to raise a claim for which relief can be granted.
Completely absent from the complaint… is any allegation that this promotion of competition between open source and proprietary software injures consumers. This absence of an allegation of harm to consumers is fatal to the complaint, reads the FSF motion.
The allegations of the complaint also show that plaintiff lacks standing to sue because he has suffered no ‘antitrust injury.’ This lack of standing and lack of antitrust injury is a separate, and independently sufficient, basis on which to dismiss the complaint, it continues.
The FSF also argued that the court should delay a briefing on Wallace’s motion for summary judgment until after ruling on its motion to dismiss.
