At 1:25 AM +0000 9/17/06, Jason R. Mastaler wrote: > I understand what you're saying, but seriously, who cares > if the mailman lists were added without anyone's approval?
I do. The other listowners do. Lots of other owners of other lists that I've talked to likewise care what's being done with their lists. > Gmane is a valuable and useful service and does no damage > to anyone. I disagree. Among other things, they frequently take away control that the listowners have over who is allowed to subscribe to lists and who is not (and who is allowed to post and who is not), because Gmane doesn't control the subscribership of any of their gated newsgroups nor do they limit the posting privileges for most of their gated newsgroups. By rights, the listowner(s) should have the final say as to who is allowed to see the archives of their list, who is allowed to subscribe to their list, and who is allowed to post. Period. Today, Gmane may not be serving up any ads side-by-side with our content, or allowing their copy of our content to be taken by more unsavoury characters who might then use that as fodder for a spam campaign (or otherwise abuse it), but once that control is out of our hands then there's nothing we can do to protect our list and our list members. > You could think of it as someone doing the project a > favor rather than something that needs "forgiveness." In commercial circles, the kind of thing that they're doing is called piracy -- they take someone else's content and repurpose that for their own benefit and for the benefit of their customers. Okay, so Lars has a policy that they don't ever take someone else's content without their express approval, but we know of multiple examples where that policy was not followed. If they did rigorously follow that policy, then what they do could potentially be classified under fair use, depending on how they use that and make it available to their customers. Okay, so Lars does not today make a profit running Gmane. That doesn't mean that tomorrow he won't change his mind, or "sell" the business to someone else who will. > The fact that you have philosophical objections to > Gmane shouldn't affect whether the Mailman lists are > carried there. That's unfair to everyone else. If I and all the other listowners have a philosophical objection to Gmane copying and repurposing our content, then that most definitely *should* affect whether our lists are carried there -- that's a key part of our job. We're not against other sites carrying copies of our content, if we are convinced that they will operate in good faith and will abide by our policies (and their own). We do this today with mail-archive.com, who host the official searchable archives of this list, among others. If the Gmane folks had actually come to us first, we might well have approved their request to set up a gateway. But they didn't, and if they violate that most basic principle of good operation and good netizenship, we have to seriously wonder what other good principles that they might accidentally one day occasionally violate. And you better believe that we're looking into nabble.com, too. From what I can tell, it looks like just another site that takes what they think is "free content" and then re-packages that for their own benefit. As an Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) project, we try to be pretty open with our software and all the related content, but there are still some boundaries that have to be respected. Most basic among those are copyright (and copyleft). We get pretty unhappy when others casually violate these boundaries and don't show us the respect that we are due. -- Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755 Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp