Daniel Wallace, who in the past has taken the GPL, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), IBM, Red Hat and Novell to court for price-fixing, has written a letter to the Federal Trade Commission complaining about the GPL.

In it he says the GPL is "slowly destroying the market for independent software applications" and that the FSF is out "to destroy the intellectual property value in computer software," drawing the agency's attention to such FSF-produced collateral as the provocatively titled "dotCommunist Manifesto."

Wallace told the regulator that the obvious target of the open source business model is Microsoft and Windows.

"Unfortunately," he says, "it is not Microsoft who suffers. The result of this predatory pricing at 'no charge' for intellectual property under the GPL license is causing the foreclosure of any remaining intellectual property market for the individual software developer and small business entrepreneur dealing in POSIX operating systems and various applications for the desktop and enterprise markets. The license is a per se violation of the antitrust laws."

Taking his argument a step further, he says, "Removing the profit incentive in intellectual software property creation is even suppressing the enrollment of new students training for careers in the computer sciences here in the United States."

(This article appeared originally at www.clientservernews.com.)