** Alex Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2007-09-25 21:42]: > On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 21:05 +0100, Paul Tansom wrote: > > All good projects, but none are alternatives to Gmail since they are > > purely the application and not a service. Things like Operamail, > > Hotmail, etc. are comparable to Gmail, but clearly no better on an > > ethical stand point. > > To be honest, the only thing stopping people offering them as a service > is time and expertise: with stuff like the Amazon platform, it's > extremely easy to deploy free software web mail at cost. It's > theoretically very easy to take a piece of free software, offer it as a > service, and you don't need to deploy any infrastructure. > > The big difference is likely that very few people are going to want to > pay for web mail. And if you want something for free, there's a quid pro > quo - in the Google case, advertising (or whatever). So, if you want to > offer a service based on free software, you're going to have to > subsidise it heavily to get it off the ground. > > I have to say, personally I don't see an ethical issue in there in free > software terms. If Google were deploying Squirrelmail instead of their > custom job, it would have all the same problems. If you want the service > for 'free', you give up something non-monetary. ** end quote [Alex Hudson]
Agreed. I personally don't have any issue with Gmail, and I do use it myself, twice over actually as I am in the process of migrating one of my ADSL connections to an ISP that uses a branded Gmail service. The big thing about a free webmail service is how you pay for the disk space and bandwidth required. That bit was more mentioned in passing with reference to a bit not quoted from earlier in the thread :) My use of Gmail is actually quite low though, as I prefer to use my own domains for email, which sit on my own servers that are now running Roundcube (prior to that SquirrelMail, but I never found that a particularly attractive package to use - and that's not a reference to its lack of graphical appeal!). -- Paul Tansom _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
