Is mobile spam OK if the sender pays?

Translation. If the sender pays will you take mobile spam?

Technically, all that's happening is that Funambol is integrating its open source messaging service with Amobee's API.

Amobee says its solution lets advertisers develop an application once and deliver it to all operators, all handsets, and all platforms.

The idea is to subsidize the delivery of content with the ads in an environment that allows targeting based on both the content of what you're getting and your behavior. This is what the Internet has been moving toward for years.

The question, of course, is how many users, spending how much money, will sign-up for these services. You might not like this in principle, but if there are one or two bits of content you might like under this model, they have you hooked.

This is only partly an open source story. It's also a story about mobile messaging, about business models, and about stopping spam.

After all, if spammers really had to pay for each message they send, as they do in the Amobee model, how many would they send?

With that, please feel free to dump all over this if you like.