Brion Vibber wrote:
A separate policy for proprietary client-side apps would have to be policed on the honor system; someone could always have their client claim to be amaroK and we'd never be the wiser. :)
Perhaps. But imagine a scenario: Microsoft decides to add Wikipedia content on the fly for all users of Microsoft Media Player or whatever it would be. (Or Apple and iTunes, for example). We're pretty joyous about this in general (free information for everyone!) but it seems a bit unfair for us to have to foot the bill for the servers and bandwidth.
Now, if hypothetically, Apple were to include Wikipedia data by pulling it and pretending to be amoraK, presumably we would have some legal course of action, and of course the PR for them would be disastrous.
No one has said anything negative about what I'm proposing yet (that I've seen) but I should make clear that I'm not at all talking about making our free content costly for proprietary applications. It is only the hammering of our (expensive) servers that I'm worried about.
If Microsoft or Apple wants to mirror Wikipedia and hit their own servers, that's fine.
Blocking a client-side app that identifies itself with a unique user-agent or key, but behaves badly, would be easy. Blocking an app that behaves badly _and_ pretends to be legitimate software is a harder problem. (Sometimes you can distinguish between the real and the fake app by its behavior or a quirk of its HTTP submission formatting, sometimes that might not be easy.)
It seems unlikely that a popular proprietary app would do something so bad; legitimate companies would have too much to lose. It is of course possible that a spammer or smalltimer might do something malicious, but I don't suppose there is any way to prevent that.
--Jimbo