Perry E. Metzger writes:
Eric can turn the list on and off at will. By my lights, that gives him control, and thus a proprietary interest, i.e. the list is his property.
I can forge a flurry of unsubscribe requests (turn the list off) and set up the same list on another host (turn it on) at will. All of us can do this with varying degrees of difficultly. Who owns the list? (Substitute any denial of service attack for "turning off the list" if you're not convinced of the strength of the forged unsubscribes.) The list is not the software it runs on: nobody cares very much whether it runs on toad.com or c2.org except in avoiding the inconvenience of updating pointers. This is not a specious argument: in practice, people do take lists of subscribers to other machines. See recent traffic on list-maintainers for examples from exclusively professional scientific lists. As I went on to say, arguing the "ownership" of the list is absurd... it's more reasonable (and productive) to discuss actions and their expected consequences. I think the only thing that will keep people from immediately stomping away is that Eric has a strong reputation totally separate from his "bureaucratic" role of list maintainer. It remains to be seen how much that affects peoples' behaviors and how much respect he will lose for coercing, however mildly, people into using signatures. -- Todd