Xref: utzoo comp.sources.d:2149 news.admin:2250
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!killer!elg
From: elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d,news.admin
Subject: Re: binaries on the net
Message-ID: <4142@killer.UUCP>
Date: 21 May 88 21:41:32 GMT
References: <166@atpal.UUCP>
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas
Lines: 35

in article <166@atpal.UUCP>, tneff@atpal.UUCP (Tom Neff) says:
> treating usenet like one supergiant BBS where everyone's 300K demos
> are available for download.

> This point probably needs to be made forcefully: PC users (at home or
> work) with access to Usenet nearly always have access to regional
> Bulletin Boards (BBS) as well, not to mention commercial services
> like CompuServe and GEnie.  For only a few dollars in access time,
> you can get anything you want from these places, and you can put your
> own software in front of tens of thousands of PC owners.  DO IT!  Don't
> impose on the hospitality of the backbone and thousands of other sites
> trying to pervert usenet into Zoonet.  (No offense, Rahul - ARCnet is
> already a trademark. <grin>)  

AMEN!!! Sites which post 300K demos of commercial programs should be
immediately evicted from the net for abuse of net.priviliges. The
net is NOT for the marketing benefit of its participants... the net's
primary function is INFORMATION, in particular, the kind of information
and discussion needed to keep up-to-date and commercially viable
(beancounter fodder :-).  I've learned a lot from sources -- how to handle
termcap, the difference between Sys V & BSD tty drivers (:-(), how to open
console ports under AmigaDOS.... but, not a darned thing from binaries.

There ARE some valid places where binaries are appropriate. Generally, for
nifty LITTLE programming utilities, such as, for example, a "grep" utility for
whatever brand of personal computer that you have. But, only with full sources
-- you may not have Brand X compiler, but sources are still useful for other
purposes (for example, if you write a little public domain text editor, you
might want to rip the screen handling out of MicroEmacs and the
pattern-matching out of PD-grep).

--
    Eric Lee Green                     {cuae2,ihnp4}!killer!elg
         Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509              
"Is a dream a lie that don't come true, or is it something worse?"