On 10/2/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jack</b> &lt;<a href="mailto:quiet_celt@yahoo.com">quiet_celt@yahoo.com</a>&gt; wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
This is equivalent to me buying gift<br>certificates from McDonald&#39;s and then distributing<br>them to hundreds. This in effect makes me a conveyor<br>of McDonald&#39;s meals.</blockquote></div><br>I do not get this.&nbsp; When you give/resell a McDonald&#39;s gift certificate, you aren&#39;t &quot;conveying&quot; the meal in any sense at all.&nbsp; The food is at the restaurant.&nbsp; The person who has the certificate takes it to McDonald&#39;s and uses it in lieu of cash to order whatever they want.
<br>&nbsp; <br>From an accounting standpoint, the gift certificate &quot;sale&quot; isn&#39;t really a sale at all.&nbsp; It&#39;s just an exchange:&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The end result of both transactions is precisely what would have happened had there been no gift certificate involved at all.
<br><br><br>And I don&#39;t see the Novell coupons as substantially different.&nbsp; They took money from MS, in exchange for a defined value of Novell services that Novell will provide.&nbsp; This is a no-win situation for FOSS, because even trying to make the argument feeds into the &quot;GPL is VIRAL!!!111oneoneone&quot; meme.&nbsp; If we lose, we look stupid, but if we win, it confirms the meme.
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