TMPLee@DOCKMASTER.ARPA (04/10/88)
Re: Phil Goetz's comments on my reaction to comp.binaries. I consider it prudent, not timid. I didn't vote and am not doing anything to deprive you of your right to use any legal piece of software you can find, buy, or borrow. The only non-commercial software I use is kermit and I am moderately comfortable with that only because I know something of its history and that it has been extensively tested for years. I've also glanced over the source code (although I pretty much have to trust that Ted Medin is a good guy.) [The very first time I used (PC) kermit, to transfer a file on a PC-clone I came to the instant realization that here I was using a program furnished by an Ivy League university and that while it was displaying a simple count of blocks sent and received I HADN'T THE FOGGIEST IDEA what else it might be doing on either the PC or the remote system.] (please, no flames about Columbia: I went to a (different) Ivy League school myself and was just dimly referring to the fact that extreme anti-social behavior -- as in the late 60's -- has been known to occur at such places.) (Whether the cause was justified or not is irrelevant.) A recent case in point: I have of course been having the same problem as others with kermit3.8x and bells not getting along too well; happened to notice the recent reference to a patch on Apple2-L that would fix the problem. I expected a few lines of code with an explanation that I'd be able to understand. There is no way I'm going to install the 350 or so lines (at what, 64 bytes per line?) of mystery code that came back from BROWNVM (or wherever: the return routing says it in fact came via MIT, even though I had to send the request via CUNY) in the middle of my communications program. Sorry, even though I recognize the names of the author and maintainer and have no quarrel with them, there are just too many places someone else could have got in the act.