Paraphrasing you

Paraphrasing you

Posted Jan 17, 2006 4:30 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104)
In reply to: Misunderstanding of embedded system designers by karim
Parent article: GPLv3: a first look

I disagree with your conclusion, but you're not entirely off track.

First, from what I have seen spam is not going away any time soon. Partly due to the fact that those advertizing by the means of spam (i.e. those who hire spammers) have very little understanding of the technology, its impact, and the rest, which makes them very easily convinced that they must use every possible means to protect their turf. If you can scare someone into believing that a foreigner (someone of a different skin color, religion or -- closer to home -- more technologically apt) will take away their bread and butter or put their livelyhood in danger, you can bet they'll use every and any possible means that this doesn't happen, including requiring that those he entrusts his "work" to provide firm guarantees.

That's just human nature. And whether free software developers want to allow spammers caught in the crossfire to use a piece of software or not won't really change much. Spam will remain until the fear I describe above is present, there's nothing any software license can do about it.

You want to make spam go away? Just don't buy stuff advertized by spam. It's as simple as that. The one thing the "creators" of spam will hate more than the fear of not making money, is actually not making any.

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