Are you a socialist?
Most ridiculous exchange ever!
For Groundspeak to keep this all going, they are going to need funds. As I see it, those funds come from two, maybe three sources. First is advertising. Maybe you missed it, but notice all those little ads on the screens? Yup, someone paid money for those to appear there, in hopes that you would spend money and patronize their businesses. Hmmm, no Bolsheviks in sight yet!
Second is premium memberships. This has always felt less like a cable bill and more like the $50 you give to your local public TV station to get your Andrea Bocelli DVD. It makes you feel good, and you get some nice perks.
Third (my guess is that this is a pretty small fraction) is merchandise and licensing.
Does watching broadcast ("free") television make you a socialist? Of course not. But just like broadcast tv, geocaching is not, and never has been free. The reality is that even if you aren't paying for a premium membership, your eyeballs are in fact helping Groundspeak pay the bills.
There just aren't that many PMO caches (at least in my neck of the woods) for this to be a huge issue. It actually is to the benefit of Groundspeak to limit PMO caches a bit -- the non-PMO's are the gateway that gets new cachers involved. Theoretically, if you had an area with nothing but PMO caches, my guess is that it would be a stagnant and declining area for geocaching.
I don't see how it is so ridiculous. Maybe I should have narrowed the quote. He stated "paying a fee to find/log a cache should never become mandatory...the end of free caching..." and given how absolute he sounded about it I took it as a socialist mentality. That you should never have to pay for a service that someone is providing to you is just that kind of mentality as if Geocaching.com's services belong to the people and is some kind of God-given right. It was just a question. How else would you describe it?
