(Echelon is an intelligence network of five countries: New Zealand, The United States, Australia, Canada and Britain)
268 karma · joined July 17, 2010
(Echelon is an intelligence network of five countries: New Zealand, The United States, Australia, Canada and Britain)
It uses a duel licensing (AGPLv3 / Commercial) setup. How AGPLv3 applies to web applications is a significant grey area, and could imply an expectation that all javascript code of the application needs be AGPL also.
Answers in the forum are vague and no clear indication has been given to when a commercial license is is not required.
TL;DR: Want to use this in a web app? Pay for a commercial license or consult a lawyer
It'll let you know what you can charge based on your circumstances - consider it a bottom line figure. Markets are such that supply and demand will alter this (if your skills are short supply, like being one of the few developers in the area, it's likely you can charge more)
Doing this speeds up the process and avoids a huge amount of oversight, consideration and public input, and has very much caught the NZ public by surprise.
It's unlikely we (NZ public) will get organised enough to change this, and past laws with significant public outcry (which this doesn't have yet) have stayed without review, as referendum's are not binding in NZ.
This tends to discourage abuse of the legal system for intimidation, as there is a risk it will backfire on you and you will end up paying for all lawyers involved.
Maybe we could get better results by identifying unanswered questions.
Jasonkeste's idea for tying reputation to comments could be done with an icon. Our (New Zealand's) equivalent of ebay does this quite well.
This will balance out the uneven distribution of karma that is talked about above, as new comments will be seen and given a chance to voted on even well into a conversation.
Having done this, comments that stop being relevant to the conversation should drop to the bottom and naturally attract less attention. Ideally, this will leave trolling posts ignored. (This can be helped further by having user selected timeout apply. If comment / responses are mapped as a tree, hide all branches that have no new activity for the past x hours, allowing users to change x as they choose. Give visual feedback to a comments age by fading old comments)
This solves the 'income' end of the system, as karma should now be distributed a little more evenly over time.