The GNU General Public License requires that sublicenses be granted for free. Today, The Seventh Circuit (opinion of Easterbrook, J.) decides that this is not an antitrust problem. Alas, the court does not cite (sometime blogger) Heidi S. Bond, What's So Great About Nothing? The GNU General Public License and the Zero-Price-Fixing Problem, 104 Mich. L Rev.. 547 (2006) available at SSRN.

C.f. William Shakespeare, King Lear, act 1, sc. 1:

King Lear: Speak.

Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.

King Lear: Nothing!

Cordelia: Nothing.

King Lear: Nothing will come of nothing.

As a generally right-wing inclined person, I'm obviously disappointed by the election. Not because this crop of republicans was any good, but because I'd rather not have the other guy. Still, there's a lot of satisfaction, from a relatively recently naturalized citizen's point of view, from seeing my folks admit they got thumped, pack up, and go home. The Democrats did so in 2004, and it's our turn to take our beating now.

But - put all that aside for the moment. The NY Times had a story a while back about how friends of different persuasions had stopped talking politics because they disagreed. The article struck me, because I've always found exactly that to be the great difference between American and European politics. When I was in college and grad school, for example, most of my friends were out and out socialists, with the occasional actual, real, live, communist thrown in. So what if they thought I was a barbarian? And so what if they wanted to bring down freedom? We could have really great discussions, without worrying that we were somehow offending each other.

And yet here at home, with the tiny differences in philosophy between our right and left, there's all this really puzzling anger, which spills over into all kinds of unexpected arenas. In fact, I've run into a large number of people here who won't date political opponents, which I find especially puzzling. I suppose there's some sense in thinking that you can't share your life with someone who thinks taxes ought to be lower, but it seems a strange position to deny that rational, smart, people can come to different conclusions than you have.

aybe we take our politics more seriously over here, though that seems a little unlikely. Or maybe it's just a matter of decorum -of culture. Our Senate and House "debates"/monologues, after all, follow the general trend of avoiding direct confrontation. What I've tried to explain to Europeans who complain about all this is that the real knife fighting in America is done away from each other - through duelling articles, and TV, and whatnot, and less so face to face.

My guess is that both cultural set ups, the American and the European, lead to vibrant democracies. But purely from a perspective of someone wanting conversation, I wish we were more like Europe on this one.