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