[atlas] Using Atlas for commercial services

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 4:19 AM, Sanjeev Gupta <ghane0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 6:31 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr>
> wrote:
>>
>> Can I use Atlas as a basis for commercial services?
>
> I see no reason why not.  As long as the use patterns on my probes do not
> change, I lose nothing, and you are welcome to make money.

Exactly my point. Unless the probes don't consume significantly more
resources it's there to help connectivity. If someone wants to provide
a service then s/he must constantly generate credits which results
more probes to be available for me. It causes me no harm if someone
earns money while providing me resources.

However as others mentioned it strongly requires a well balanced
credit system to prevent large volume users (be they commercial or
not) to consume too much resource, and to prevent small individual
probe owners from starving by not being able to provide enough credits
to be able to make their own measurements.

Basically that's the same as open source / open content economy:
commercial insterests have to provide resources to the others in
exchange of their (smaller) resources. (Probably there should be some
requirement to assure topologically well distributed probes from mass
users.)

g