On Feb 20, 2010, at 10:01 AM, Marc Powell wrote: > On Feb 19, 2010, at 12:53 PM, Dean Anderson wrote: > >> So you should think that its ok for blacklists to charge money for >> things they got for free? > > In the case of Spamhaus, yes, I find it acceptable to pay them for the > service they are providing me because I find it very useful, and with the > understanding that they are non-profit, have costs related to providing the > service and provide a free service for people with less volume than me. With > regards to other lists, I would say that it depends on infrastructure costs > they incur to provide that service, regardless of whether the content is > community provided or not. The information may have been obtained freely but > there are costs to disseminate it. Do you think that they should absorb all > the costs of providing it as a free service?
I would go a lot farther and Just Say Yes. How many of us here got something for 'free'? Do you feel guilty selling ISP services where the mail server is running FreeBSD or Postfix? Or the name server in BIND on Linux? Should we all just stop and go home now? Spamhaus has gotten things for free, yes. I don't have a problem with them selling it, and I don't see why you should - unless you are one of the people providing such free services. And that doesn't even consider the huge value Spamhaus adds to that free stuff they got. Do you honestly think those providing service for Spamhaus do not know this is happening? (Careful how you answer, as I used to be authoritative for spamhaus.org, I know a little bit about this.) If nothing else, they got the service for free! (When I ran one of the authorities, I could query it as often as I liked for $0. :) -- TTFN, patrick
