Sunday, April 25, 2010

Account suspended by Yahoo Answers for promoting the use of FOSS

Recently I received a few e-mails from Yahoo Answers claiming I violated there community guidelines and terms of service and that my account would be suspended for these reasons. The main reason for this suspension seems to be from what Yahoo considers spam. It seems there idea of spam is when people promote or suggest the use of free and open source software(FOSS) to people who would otherwise pay hundreds of dollars to Microsoft for software that does the same exact thing.

I will emit that I intended on using Yahoo Answers as a way to get backlinks to my website www.pcandmoney.com and this blog, but promoting my own website and blog were not among the reasons that my account was suspended. Out of three e-mails sent from Yahoo Answers, two clearly stated that I was using spam and directing commercial activity to non-Yahoo sites. Now my question is if Linux is free how can I be directing commercial activity to other sites. The website  in question is www.distrowatch.com, which gives potential GNU/Linux users information about different Linux distributions. The last e-mail from Yahoo Answers was not clear about how I violated their terms of service, but in the question asked by the poster, I made a statement that there is never any reason to pirate software when Linux is absolutely free.

Below are excerpts from each e-mail from Yahoo Answers and their reasons for suspending my account. I will allow the viewers of this blog to be the judge and tell me if my account was unfairly suspended or if I am in the wrong. Please keep in mind that Microsoft and Yahoo recently made a deal with each other and are now working together to try and topple the search engine giant Google.



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