On May 6, 2010, at 9:28 PM, Terry Reedy wrote: > On 5/6/2010 8:43 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> On Fri, 7 May 2010 12:34:24 am Tarek Ziadé wrote: >>> Hello, >>> >>> The Softpedia website sends an email to everyone that register or >>> uploads something at PyPI. This is clearly a spam and their website >>> don't care about our projects. >>> >>> I am not sure if they use the PubSubHubbub thing, but I was wondering >>> how we could prevent these unsolicited mails. >> >> I don't know that we should be responsible for trying to prevent every >> bad use of PyPI. I'm not even convinced that the Softpedia emails are >> spam in any legal or ethical sense. >> >> It's not a mass broadcast of email: each email gets sent to *one* >> recipient. Re-distributing the software on PyPI is legal under the >> terms of the licences (possibly with a few exceptions). I think you >> would fail to convince a judge that, legally, Softpedia is spamming or >> engaged in any unreasonable action. You certainly fail to convince me. > > I am not completely convinced either. It appears to be a legitimate site that > people use to access FOSS software, with relatively subdued ads (except for > the double-underscore popup boxes). I do notice that > http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Distutils2/1.0a1 > shows 0 downloads at the moment whereas > http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Libraries/Distutils2-56577.shtml > shows 14. The python3.1.2 page shows nearly 10000. That much, if truthful, is > good. > > If one uploads often, I see how the 'curtesy' letter could be annoying.
I think most FOSS authors are aware that putting their email in a package is effectively putting it in the clear on the internet. I think we have come beyond the days of "noah (at) coderanger [dot] net" and all those silly tricks that were popular not too long ago. If an author is excessively concerned about spam, they shouldn't put their email in author_email. Is that field mandatory now or something? Softpedia is a little annoying with the emails, but I've found them useful personally (along with versiontracker) when looking for OS X software before. Freshmeat is a similar index of FOSS projects, and I've definitely used that before. Is there some reason we are objecting to including PyPI data in other software catalogs? If it makes it a tiny bit easier to find Python software, I'm all for it. --Noah _______________________________________________ Catalog-SIG mailing list Catalog-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/catalog-sig
