crm@rti-sel.UUCP (08/10/84)
There has been considerable furor about product announcements and ads on the net. I would like to see the product announcements keep coming, would not like to see periodic advertisements like on TV. Also, there seem to be a number of people whose sensibilities are abused by announcement of commercial products over the net -- I got a lot of mail of the sort "if you can't afford to go to USENIX, you can't buy this stuff anyway, why should you want to see it?" as well as other less polite responses. Why commercial announcements offend so many, and why they are qualitatively different from the announcements of academic products, is a topic for speculation that I am not willing to deal with. So, I think I have a solution. Let's establish a ``net.products'' or a ``net.lang.announcements'' exclusively for the transmission of product announcements, with content limited as the usenet guide that was quoted here specifies (i.e. technical info rather than simple product hype required.) I would subscribe to it, no-one who was offended need subscribe to it, and -- if as has been suggested to me -- DEC doesn't like it, DECVAX could simply not transfer the whole news group. This solution seems vastly preferable to what others seem to think is the proper policy -- no commercial announcements at all. Charlie Martin