aps (04/16/83)
The following message came accros my terminal today.
>From decwrl!sun!megatest!fortune!twg!anne (Anne Wunderlich)
Fri Apr 15 17:55:42 1983
Subject: new TWG service!
Newsgroups: net.eunice
************************************************************
* Attention All EUNICE Users! *
************************************************************
The Wollongong Group (TWG) is pleased to announce a new
service --
The Electronic Modification Request Service (EMRS)
This service is now available for all TWG EUNICE Clients
holding a TWG Maintenance Agreement, or EUNICE Users who are
under a TWG warranty.
The system provides all EUNICE sites subscribing to USENET a
fast and easy way to report modification requests.
To obtain more information on EMRS, and an Electronic MR
Form, send your System Administrator (or your authorized
site representative's name) and USENET address, along with
your TWG License Number to:
Anne Wunderlich
(twg!anne)
The Wollongong Group, Inc.
Note that this was submitted to net.eunice on the UNIX network.
Now, I do not want to open a can of worms, but the question should be
asked: Should the network be used by people providing a service for
commercial gain??? It is one thing to allow "informational"
announcements (advertising) but it is really another matter when the
network is used as the communications media for a service offering.
Should the network nodes have to carry the cost of commercial uses of
the network now? I think not. I think that TWG should be required to
connect to each machine that they provide a service to.
Using the network to "rendezvous" with TWG (as one would with a
phone number) is fine with me. But once contact is established, the
customer and TWG should establish their own seperate link(s) or subnet.
Allowing this kind of activity to go on will mean certain death in thr
form of an overflow of traffic on the Net when companies like IBM, DG,
or DEC get into electronic Trouble/Modification Requests. (We plan to
look into this for SPR's for UNIX but it would be a seperate "star"
network with the center in our Colorado Springs facility.)
Further, I think it presumptuous of TWG to announce this "service"
without some effort to poll the people who manage some of the nodes
of the network.
Anne Wonderlick, forgive me if you did poll and I didn't see it.
Armando Stettner
DEC UNIX Engineering Group.alt (04/19/83)
I think it is very unreasonable for anyone to use the net for commercial purposes. A lot of sites spend money on telephone calls that they get nothing back for (except getting on the net.). I wouldn't be supprised if some sites started writing code to block things like the Mantinence program. Now, if the company extended this (the maintinence program) free, I suspect no one would care, but CHARGE for it? Net.wanted dosn't count in all of this, because many people on the net are interested, but charging for a service that should be free is outrageous. Howard.
mark (04/21/83)
Please move all discussion about this to net.news. Mark Horton