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From: grr@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (George Robbins)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Which companies pay for news?  Which companies benefit?
Message-ID: <241@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 14-May-86 02:56:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbmvax.241
Posted: Wed May 14 02:56:36 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 15-May-86 06:48:12 EDT
References: <222@epimass.UUCP>
Reply-To: grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins)
Distribution: net
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 62

In article <222@epimass.UUCP> jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck) writes:
>
>Some of the net's biggest corporate beneficiaries are the makers of
>personal computers.  One such company is one of the largest
>corporations in the world.  Another has seven newsgroups (10% of all
>net traffic!)  devoted to discussions of its products.  A third has
>five.  These companies know who they are, and you know who they are.
>All three are much bigger freeloaders that someone who mails the
>sources to hack (I was amused to read one of the corporate
>freeloaders flaming others for net abuse).
>
>All make good products, and many people on the net want to read about
>them.  But two of the three have only leaf sites on the net, and pay
>almost no phone bills and move no news.  The third could certainly do
>a lot more.  A cost-benefit analysis at any of these sites would show
>that spending money on netnews is a good thing.  It would be a lot
>easier for people at those sites to justify the phone bills to
>management than it would be for those who currently foot the bill.  
>
>- Joe Buck 	{ihnp4!pesnta,oliveb}!epimass!jbuck
>  Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, California

I guess I'll have to assume that at least one of the net.parasites you are
describing is Commodore and/or Commodore/Amiga.

Your comments are interesting, but you seem to be making the assumption that
Commodore is on the net primarily to promote and/or support our products.  This
*IS NOT* the case!  The various Commdore/Amiga groups were created by Usenet
Users who wanted to talk about Commodore/Amiga products, not by some kind of
corporate agents.

We also encourage Commodore/Amiga users to utilize the commercial networks to
communicate with other users and support persons, although we haven't posted
this lately.  At last count, we support users on Compuserve, BIX, Quantum Link,
and an Amiga Developers bulletin board.  We *PAY* employees to sit at terminals
and service these networks, while any usenet activity is strictly a personal
affair of interested engineers.

Further, Commodore (cbmvax, cbm) is not a leaf node - we have extensive mail
links which are documented in the netmaps (where are you?) - and we distribute
news to several local sites, with several more who will be welcome whenever
they get around to installing news.  There is no telephone money allocated to
usenet and mail - we have to work things the way most other sites do.  I've
been on the carpet several times over the phone bills...

So, please look elsewhere for net.bad-guys!  Usenet is still user driven, and
I hope it stays that way.  Do you want IBM to subsidize net.micro.pc when, in
a corporate sense, they don't even know it exists?

Did I flame hplabs?  You bet...  If I ever make such a public mess of things,
I expect my terminal to collect so many flames that it's shooting out Z-rays.
So far, they've sent trashed news, munged headers, volumes of duplicated news
and, latest, munged articles with good headers.

Ignoring any wasted money involved, blowing spool files often results in lost
mail and operational problems.  The munged articles with good headers block
the transmission/posting of the originals.  My postings were intended mostly
as informative warnings - scan your spool files for the real flames...
-- 
George Robbins - now working with,	uucp: {ihnp4|seismo|caip}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing	arpa: cbmvax!grr@seismo.css.GOV
Commodore, Engineering Department	fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)