Re: revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo

[Kumar Appaiah <a.kumar@alumni.iitm.ac.in>]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 10:57:15PM -0500, Kumar Appaiah wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 04:45:33PM +0000, Clint Adams wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 07:50:06PM -0500, Kumar Appaiah wrote:
> > > maintainers aggressively alter the default User-Agent or some other
> > > indicator which would deny upstream their rightful due. Would you agree?
> > 
> > I reject and resent the idea that any software project has
> > the entitlement to profit off of my web traffic.
> > 
> > Treating the change of a query string as theft is as ridiculous
> > as broadcast TV stations telling me I'm robbing them by
> > skipping commercials.
> 
> I wholly agree and I was not suggesting that we deny upstreams their
> rightful due under any circumstance. I was also shocked by the Banshee
> episode.

Actually, it was pointed out that this wasn't the argument that was
being made, and that there was an inconsistency in what I have said
above. Apologies.

One way of looking at this is: if the project is "free" software, then
the end-user (he/she/distro) has a right to edit the source and shape
the web traffic the way they want. Calling out users and downstreams
for altering this behaviour goes against calling the software
"free". I guess this is what Clint was saying.

Thanks and sorry again.

Kumar
-- 
If Bill Gates is the Devil then Linus Torvalds must be the Messiah.
		-- Unknown source