[Catalog-sig] The "Softpedia" spam

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri May 7 06:28:24 CEST 2010


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.

Terry Jan Reedy




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