RMS on Plan 9 license, with my comments

[David Johnson]

On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, Matthew C. Weigel wrote:

> I can't understand this.  You agree, completely, that we don't know (barring
> someone doing legal research) what 'reasonable fee' means.  And then you
> argue that as long as the definition of an ephemeral word is not contested,
> there's no problem, we should let it stay.  Am I getting this right?  I
> don't mean to build a straw man argument... it just looks as if you're
> trying to view the language as cut and dried, when it's not.

You're completely misunderstanding what I was trying to say. Since I
don't know how a judge or jury will define "reasonable", I have to fall
back to my next authoritative definition, and that is the definition
from the dictionary.

Okay, I'm going to my dictionary now...

Uh oh, it looks like there are contradicting definitions for
"reasonable" in relation to prices. However the
dictionary (www.m-w.com) has these:

"being in accordance with reason", which is the definition I had been
using, and that commonly used by economists in reference to prices. To
an economist, a price is always reasonable if the buyer and seller
agree.

There is also "not extreme or excessive", which seems to be the
definition that RMS was using in saying that this claused limited the
price to which one could sell the software media. But again, if the
buyer and seller agree, is it really excessive?

However, the kicker is the last definition: "INEXPENSIVE".  At first
this looks like it kicks holes all through the economic definition, but
looking up "inexpensive", one finds that it means "reasonable in
price" :-)

Is there a legal definition for "reasonable price" anyone? I do recall
that the US Commercial Code has the concept of "fair price", but it
would seem to apply (or not) regardless of whether "reasonable" was
struck from the license or not.

-- 
David Johnson
_________________________
<http://www.usermode.org>