[wp-hackers] Re: Spam Karma goes GPL

[Jason Webster]

Not to mention that a closed-source spam filtering application is 
theoretically harder to circumvent.

Otto wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 11:01 AM, Xavier Borderie <xavier at borderie.net> wrote:
>   
>> Well, I don't know, there might some people out there who'd rather not
>> have all their comments be handled by a third-party company through a
>> closed-source service. Keeping one's comment on one's server.
>>     
>
> See, I've heard this a lot, and I don't understand people's problem
> with this whole concept. The idea of sending comments to a service to
> have them scanned for spam makes far more sense to me, because that
> centralized system can compare comments from all over the place, and
> detect automated spammers much faster because of that.
>
> Question: Are you against the whole concept of distributed computing
> or webservices as well? For example, at my real-life job, we use a
> third party service to get real-time sales tax rate information based
> on addresses. We pay a small fee per lookup. This is better than
> trying to do it all ourselves because there's 18000 tax jurisdictions
> in this country and trying to keep up with changing rates and laws and
> such is not worth our time. If we were huge and had lots of sales,
> then maybe it would be worth the effort, but hey, maybe not.
>
> The idea of contracting out a particular specific service to a
> specialist makes sense to me. Why does it bother you to contract out
> your comment spam-scanning to Akismet?
>
> (This is not a question about the relative effectiveness of various
> methods, mind you, just the specific idea of handling it with a third
> party.)
>
> -Otto
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