RMS on Plan 9 license, with my comments

[Mark Wells]

On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, David Johnson wrote:

> 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.

'Reasonable' is ambiguous, though.  If it were left out entirely, and the
license simply said that a fee can be charged for duplication, media,
etc., the fee would of course have to be reasonable in the eyes of the
buyer and seller.  So either 'reasonable' means nothing, or it means that
someone _other_ than the buyer and seller (i.e. the court) must find the
price reasonable.

That is, it's an invitation for the court to second-guess the free market.  
Yes, the court could do this anyway, but the license shouldn't actively
encourage it.

If some judge decides that $5.00 is too much to pay for a Cheapbytes copy
of something, I suppose he could invalidate the entire license, write a
new one that says that the fee for duplication and media must always be
exactly $3.00, and maybe include a clause granting himself a 10%
commission.  That's why we have appellate courts.

> "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.

I suspect there are some economists who would disagree with that.  
(Marxists, for example, though they're getting hard to find these days.)

But if that's all 'reasonable' means, what is achieved by including
it?  The buyer and seller hardly need to be _told_ that they must agree on
a price.