Re: modified email address in debian/copyright file

[Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au>]

Andre Majorel <aym-naibed@teaser.fr> writes:

> The people who mind having their address published are not likely to
> hand it out without obfuscating it.

These aren't email addresses of close personal friends, given to a
select few people. These are email addresses given by the copyright
holder as the contact address to use in relation to a particular
software work. (If that's not the case, it's not the case under
discussion here.)

The *only* useful purpose for giving an email address to someone is
for them to put it into a computer program; for that purpose, it needs
to be in a valid form at *some* point.

There's negative value to each person holding that address to keep it
in obfuscated form: every time they want to make use of it, it needs
to either be un-obfuscated from that form, or (much more likely)
retrieved from some location where it is stored in valid form.

So it's completely unreasonable to expect that, once given out as the
contact email address for the copyright holder of a widely-published
work of software, it won't appear in valid-computer-parseable form
associated with that software.

-- 
 \               "There's no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. |
  `\    Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there's no excuse for boredom, |
_o__)                                       ever."  -- Viggo Mortensen |
Ben Finney