I was playing golf the other day with some other folks in the software business and the topic of email came up. I was talking about an article I read that claimed that the younger generation prefers instant messaging over email and quoted someone as saying that they only used email to talk to their parents. My daughter echoes many of these sentiments. Email, however, still drives much of what we do in business a I was playing golf the other day with some other folks in the software business and the topic of email came up. I was talking about an article I read that claimed that the younger generation prefers instant messaging over email and quoted someone as saying that they only used email to talk to their parents. My daughter echoes many of these sentiments. Email, however, still drives much of what we do in business and will probably be around for a long time.My particular complaint about email, though, is spam and the seeming inability to end it. I get more spam in my email than actual messages and it’s quite frustrating. As we waited on the 11th hole to make our tee shots we went back and forth about email usage and spam. The following conversation ensued:– My friend: “Would you download a piece of software to your machine that would guarantee to eliminate spam?” – Me: “No. I wan’t to be able to use web-interfaces from any machine to deal with email and I don’t want to have a client program tied to any particular machine that cleans up my spam. Besides, this is the responsibility of my ISP and the other ISP’s out there processing email. Why should I have to buy a program to install on my machine to solve this problem?”– My firend: “What if the software was free?”– Me: “Nothing’s free, would it have advertising?” – My friend: “Not at first.”– Me: “So, let me get this straight. In exchange for eliminating unwanted advertisements in my email I have to use an email program that gives me unwanted advertisements?”This exchange, of course, led us off on a number of discussions that related to responsibility. I pay for my email service. When I use the ISP’s web-based interface I get advertisements through-out the web-page. I get spam leaking into my inbox. No one’s close to claiming a solution to this systemic problem yet I’m expected to individually solve it for myself. This is no better than the virus-protection issues. A company creates an operating system susceptible to viral attack. I’m expected to purchase third-party products to protect me from the underlying design and coding issues that allow the attacks in the first place. Where is the responsibility of the creator of the operating system? What’s fascinating about this particular problem is there’s a huge debate about whether or not the O/S vendor should be allowed, because of anti-trust issues, to create their own solution to the problem. What’s irksome about the debate is the O/S vendor wants to charge me for a product designed to fix the problems they created in the first place.Where is the responsibility? Open Source