On 10/2/07, Jack quiet_celt@yahoo.com wrote:
This is equivalent to me buying gift certificates from McDonald's and then distributing them to hundreds. This in effect makes me a conveyor of McDonald's meals.
I do not get this. When you give/resell a McDonald's gift certificate, you aren't "conveying" the meal in any sense at all. The food is at the restaurant. The person who has the certificate takes it to McDonald's and uses it in lieu of cash to order whatever they want.
From an accounting standpoint, the gift certificate "sale" isn't really a
sale at all. It's just an exchange: They debit cash and credit a prepayment account, representing a liability to balance the asset. Then when the bearer redeems the gift certificate, they debit the prepayment account and credit sales. The end result of both transactions is precisely what would have happened had there been no gift certificate involved at all.
And I don't see the Novell coupons as substantially different. They took money from MS, in exchange for a defined value of Novell services that Novell will provide. This is a no-win situation for FOSS, because even trying to make the argument feeds into the "GPL is VIRAL!!!111oneoneone" meme. If we lose, we look stupid, but if we win, it confirms the meme.