Seems like Debian’s people have a strange concept of Freedom, as one of them, Wouter Verhelst, appears to like force people not to use MSN Search to reach his blog.
I find this a bit funny because of my previous blog about MSN, but of course is not much of a problem. Still, I already had a similar discussion with my old LUG when someone suggested to blacklist MSNBot from the LUG’s site.
In my opinion, that might be biased by I’m not sure what (I was told that before), blacklisting a search engine just because it’s owned by a company (Microsoft) that doesn’t have good intentions toward Free Software is a stupid move. First of all it reduce the visibility that Free Software has, exactly where people are supposed instead of seeing it as an alternative in contrast to the proprietary software that Microsoft sells.
But yes, it is true that MSNBot uses more bandwidth of Googlebot, but still, I got on MSN quite immediately, while Google still doesn’t show it in the first page at all, it means that MSN is more updated, thing that is good. Also, Yahoo! Slurp uses even more bandwidth, and even more than them, OSGalaxy and even Planet Gentoo use bandwidth.
And in any case, they are, in a little more than a week, at least 1⁄5 of the bandwidth I consume on a day since I’m again on Planet, so it’s not exactly something nobody can bear with (and I’m on a 256Kb upstream home-grade ADSL)…
It’s a strange concept of Freedom… very strange indeed.
