trebor@biar.UUCP (Robert J Woodhead) (06/11/89)
In article <356@ubbs-nh.MV.COM> noel@ubbs-nh.MV.COM (Noel B. Del More Nashua) writes: >B.T. is out to make a buck, ladies and gentleman, and that is about the >sum of it. In every instance, he has shown this to be the case. Gee, lets see. BT is providing a feed of commercial news information using net technology. He has to pay for that information, so he charges for it. In order to make the information more valuable, he provides, for free, some software that lets you filter it out in a much more sophisticated and subtle manner than, say, ``rn'', and, as a subscriber, you get to use that software on the rest of your newsfeed. BT's company mainly feeds through UUNET. UUNET gets $ when the company sends on the mail, and when a subscriber downloads it. Nobody else on the net is inconvenienced in any way. All BT is doing is using the technology of the net (as opposed to the net as a whole) in an unique and clever manner in order to provide a service that otherwise would not exist. Hell, many people may subscribe just to get the filter, and BT may, after a while, consider selling that seperately. In fact, one might make the argument that BT's company, by supporting UUNET in the way it does, helps to pay some of the costs of UUNET, and thus helps support USENET somewhat. BT is an ENTREPRANEUR. He has expended effort to provide an interesting service in the hopes that people will subscribe and thus reward his vision. If you are not interested, fine, don't subscribe; you are not inconvenienced in any way. No part of this service impacts you, or your site, in any manner unless someone at your site subscribes. Basically, your attitude is analagous to, say, a cable subscriber bitching about the nasty extra info placed in the vertical blank portion of his TV signal for the benefit of X*PRESS subscribers. I, for one, might be interested in trying out the service for a month to see if it is of value to me. I've yet to make that decision. But I'll be damned if I'll let net.puritans like you make it for me. If BT was taking net traffic and reselling it for his benefit (as was nebulously the case with the rhf compilations) that's one thing. But this is a totally different situation. Let BT and his grand scheme live or die on it's merits. If nobody subscribes, he'll lose his shirt and you'll be able to snicker at him.-- Robert J Woodhead, Biar Games, Inc. !uunet!biar!trebor | trebor@biar.UUCP ``The worst thing about being a vampire is that you can't go to matinees and save money anymore.''