Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
From: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: The Rape of Usenet
Message-ID: <15034@bfmny0.UU.NET>
Date: 27 Dec 89 17:15:36 GMT
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)
Lines: 45

First: David Small has behaved like a true net gentlebeing throughout
this episode, and he deserves public congratulations.  If only more
of us exhibited such concern for what the rest of the net thinks!

Second: Gatewaying certain special interest mailing lists and/or
newsgroups with the corresponding GEnie roundtables sounds like a
winner, providing it's two way, but also providing the GEnie moderater
staff are carefully apprised of their responsibilities as 'news admins'.
Where there are useful sources of answers out there, Usenet ought to
have access.  However clogging core newsgroups with trivial noise
traffic is undesirable.  (In fairness, GEnie seems less prone to this
than, say, CompuServe, due perhaps to attendance and the nature of the
conference/topic structure vs. flat-thread-rotating CIS Forums.)

Third: A straight, personal Email gateway is overdue and should be
created a la 'saqqara' by GEnie management.  Has nothing to do with
the rest of this discussion.  All commercial vendors should get on
the stick in this dept.

Fourth: These clear-the-air contributions from Small and Pleasant are
welcome, but the "... so let's stop discussing it" coda is misplaced.
Commercial gateway issues need to be discussed, now rather than later,
and this is a good excuse.  Nobody has the right to squelch a topic.
When it stops being interesting, it will die down of its own accord.

Fifth: The danger of establishing pussycat precedents with ONE
commercial vendor just because they seem like "nice people" is that the
NEXT vendor may be scum, but now the precedents are set.  Leave us not
kid ourselves -- unorthodox and unorganized though it may be, Usenet is
a fantastic asset to be able to advertise as 'available' on your
commercial service.  Can you just imagine the day potatohead Pournelle
gets his "Arpanet account" back via McGraw-Hill's weird BIX service?
BYTE readers will never hear the end of it, and neither will we.
An anarchist would say we should remain as "shifty" and hard to stay
connected-to as possible to discourage corporate co-optation; but even
a plain pragmatist would say we should husband our virtue.

Sixth: Would our jailhouse lawyers please not revive Ye Aulde Copyright
Argument.  Go test something in court, for crissake.  In the meantime if
you want a medium susceptible to the diligent defense of authorship
rights, pick something besides Usenet.

-- 
War is like love; it always      \%\%\%   Tom Neff
finds a way. -- Bertold Brecht   %\%\%\   tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET