On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 01:03:28AM +0900, Randy Bush <randy@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.