[mat-wg] Using Atlas for commercial services

On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 01:03:28AM +0900,
 Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote 
 a message of 12 lines which said:

> i realize that your intent is not evil.  

Thanks :-) My main intent was to clarify the question. Several people
expressed concerns about commercial use but I have to remind them
that, _today_, it is perfectly allowed and if someone sells a service
running over Atlas, he/she is today perfectly inline with Atlas' Terms
of Use. That's why I think a discussion is useful.

> when the 42nd commercial project raises the load/traffic so that
> research is no longer viable and these dinky things are overloaded,
> we'll get "but those 41 commercial products use it, not letting me
> do so is unfair restraint of trade."

On the Atlas mailing list, Michael Hook produced a nice sumamry of a
possible solution:

> As already said, commercial usage would also mean that you have to
> earn credits in some way.

> As far as I know, it's only possible to earn credits by
> - hosting probes itself
> - sponsoring new probes
> - getting a LIR

> In either of the first two cases, the atlas project will benefit
> from it.  The third one is a special case and isn't worth a
> discussion.