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Skirting AOL Checksumming -- Legally?
A less-than-anonymous coward pointed out an interesting story on NewsForge outlining a (hypothetical) system for avoiding AOL's occasional cutting-off of non-official clients. Whether this is particularly legal, or only hard to catch, is another question, but it sounds workable. Of course, wouldn't it be better to just use an actually open and extensible format instead?
The Open Source proponents of depliticizing the movement and making it open to business is failling. Everyone is coming off as a hippie communist looking to take stuff from others.
This is beyond bizarre. AOL runs a group of expensive servers and has told you to use their client. You CAN'T even claim interoperability, there IS a Linux client, and there IS a Java Express Client, and the tickle client floating around.
They have made every effort to have a compatible client available for you.
The fact that you would prefer your own doesn't give you a right to their services.
However, by showing that we won't respect the law nor attempts at technical limitations, you discredit all of us. For those of us trying to win adoption for Open Source tools and platforms, stuff like this is a huge step back.
We're not sure if this is legal, but we think we might have finally found a loophole.
Congratulations, you have violated ehd spirit of the law but not the letter. That doesn't make you a moral person.
And immoral behavior is not acceptable because the victim is a corporation.