Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!att!chinet!patrick
From: patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: In Moderation: A Moderator's Re
Message-ID: <8800@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 29 Jun 89 03:25:35 GMT
References: <3300@epimass.EPI.COM> <197600001@inmet> <14403@bfmny0.UUCP> <3749@viscous.sco.COM>
Reply-To: patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 31

In article <3749@viscous.sco.COM> davidbe@sco.COM (The Cat in the Hat) writes:
>tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) said:

>I just don't understand what all the fuss is about.  Or are ALL of you people
>against the IM network members of the Free Software Foundation (who's viewpoint
>I understand).

I am not a member of FSF. And I understand their viewpoint also, although I
don't entirely agree with it.

I am not opposed to anyone making money from their own creative efforts. Nor
am I opposed to people who want to give their work away, i.e. FSF. I actually
do a little of each.

My opposition is to taking an effort directed one way (such as Usenet) and
attempting to subvert it to work the other way. Let the people who want to
have commercial network activity start all the commercial nets they want;
sign up all the paying subscribers they can, and do their thing. But I did
not drop my membership in Compuserve and start participating in Usenet 
in order to send my efforts out to another commercial service.

If you see no objection in people making commercial and profitable use of
Usenet, then try it in reverse: Ask GEnie or Compuserve to allow free
use of their stuff on Usenet. See how far it gets you. Think about the
response from CIS, etc, and see if you can understand why some of us feel
the same way in reverse.

-- 
Patrick Townson 
  patrick@chinet.chi.il.us / ptownson@bu-cs.bu.edu / US Mail: 60690-1570 
  FIDO: 115/743 / AT&T Mail: 529-6378 (!ptownson) /  MCI Mail: 222-4956