| > The for-profit company is happy, anyway. They get free data and you've priced the competition out of the market. And they'll also be happy to disregard all your wishes for them to implement their own caching layer and if you have no way to block this kind of activity they absolutely will do it. As demonstrated in the example I gave you. > If you want to create an open source one which is free and promises not to track the user, you can, but then you need the data. If you end up with millions of users, who has more resources to set up caching servers, some individual idealist with zero revenue or the United States Government? Me - as a taxpayer - isn't really keen on paying for everyone to build their application on top of it. If you create an open source application you can always tell the users how to obtain such a token. > This shouldn't even be a question. The government has to operate infrastructure that can handle millions of users for many other reasons. This should be something they're experienced in, and something like this should just fit into a slot in existing infrastructure. This is what it's for. If all you want is to provide the data for various scummy middlemen to wrap in ads and spyware then why is it an API at all instead of a static data dump / live feed with the latest changes? Again - why should I as a taxpayer have to pay for that? For me, the taxpayer, the service is just as available and usable, even if I have to request a token to use the service. How do you propose you'd limit how a service can be consumed without some kind of token? We've already established that your other solutions doens't work. The alternative is likely just to not provide the service at all, which seems like a net loss for everyone involved, both for for-profit business, taxpayers and open source developers. |