[Greasemonkey] Conversation or conflict

[Neil Kandalgaonkar]

The headers debate is IMO somewhat irrelevant. Website publishers are
going to respond, collectively, to user scripts anyway. Probably sooner 
than we expect. (Viz. Forrester, we can see that the industry is already 
spinning this as a "hacking" problem, and will hope to sell another 
iteration of tools to "solve" it.)

So yeah, you may hasten their response by announcing it in the headers. 
But their response is coming anyway.

What I like about Aaron's proposal is that he's thinking ahead -- giving
our community a chance to control that response. I know for a fact that 
some companies are quite open to conversing with user script authors.

Announcement headers might be a way to start that conversation, but they 
have some difficulties -- the main one being well-discussed here: they 
impose the conversational model, whereas some script authors want to be 
stealthy.

Whether we have headers or not, I think the concept of starting 
conversations with GM'ed websites is good. Maybe they should be public, 
too -- email is invisible. When someone wants to know what website 
publishers think about GM, it would be nice to have something to point 
to that shows the reaction is not wholly negative.

-- 
Neil Kandalgaonkar
neilk at brevity.org | http://brevity.org/