taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (03/25/87)
[a previous copy of this posting may have escaped my machine before being killed. If so, please ignore it and read/reply to this one instead.] ******************************************************************************** ** This is a verbatim copy of a message I have sent to the USENIX Association ** ** board of directors and the editor of the USENIX Association Journal ** ** ";login:". I think it is a matter that deserves considerable attention ** ** from the members of the USENET and Unix Community. ** ******************************************************************************** An insidious thing is happening to the Unix community while we sit and watch - it's being changed from a fun, exemplary, free and democratic system to a system that is ruled by a few that wield power for reasons of personal gain and ego. While they present themselves as having the best interests of the community at heart, I strongly believe that this isn't the case. For example, the recent announcement of the charge to register a host with the "UUCP Mapping Project" was extremely disturbing - it is a transition from a totally free system (e.g. the pathalias solution) to a system that *costs quite a bit of money*. The purported reason was for administration and overhead costs. I don't accept that. Furthermore, I see no reason why we couldn't have developed a solution that allows the power and freedom of the domain naming scheme, with routing by a given domain to a specific 'server' machine, and then posted it to Usenet and made it available via the Usenix Distribution Tape and other means. Similarly, the original idea of Stargate was to provide sites with an alternative to expensive phone bills by using a one-way satellite link/ cable link. Instead, what has arisen from the work is a system that will involve thousands of dollars per site to sign up and become operational on. Is this meeting the goals? The decoder box story is a good example - the original intention was for the Stargate group to find a few good hardware hackers to design a box that would be really cheap to produce and ship them out to hardware-intensive Usenet sites *with schematics* in the hope that they could be designed even cheaper and faster. Instead what has happened is that it has become 'proprietary' and we are expected to foot the exorbitant bill for a Stargate feed, without any promise of a reduction in cost in the future. This is quite disturbing, to say the least. Sufficiently so that I seriously question whether it is appropriate for the Usenix Association to continue working with the group, let alone fund them. Similarly, it is quite disturbing that the UUCP Mapping Project, as mentioned above, has taken the route of organizing a 'non-profit corporation' and expecting quite a bit of money from people. This is *not* at all in the best interests of the membership. In fact, there are already existing solutions that could handle the new domain naming scheme that are *in the public domain* or at least sufficiently accessable that we could all have them up and running within two months of a change being announced. And having it all public would ensure that it would be improved on, and I think we all agree that dynamic software, hardware, and in general, technology is infinitely better than a static, carved-in-stone solution, however excellent it may appear at that point in time. I think a special meeting of the USENIX Association is in order, with a questionnaire sent out to the members of the organization explaining what has happened, what is currently happening, the road that this leads us down, alternative solutions and so on. The bottom line is to have the membership decide whether our current direction is appropriate or not. And I, obviously, feel *very* strongly that it is not. Further examples of the perversion of the Unix community can be easily gleaned from a monitoring of the last few years of the Usenet community. Five years or so ago when I started reading Usenet, it was a free-wheeling teleconferencing system, quite fun, quite strange, and generally, a good way to spend a small bit of my time. In the past few years, however, a so-called Backbone Cabal has arisen that has more-or-less taken over the network and imposed their own ideas and beliefs upon it. A few months ago this same cabal decided that it would be useful to rename all the newsgroups. The purported reasons were that it would be an improvement in; 1. the logical organization of the net, and 2. easier to administer. I don't believe that either goal has been achieved. Renaming the groups is not an appropriate solution to the first goal, for example, because the solution need be at the level of implementing something that allows people to browse groups by "keyword" or "topic" (and remove the whole concept of newsgroups except as an administrative and transmission aid). Secondly, the renaming the groups isn't a good way to help the administration of the netnews systems either - Better administration tools are really what is needed in this case. But the names were changed. And hundreds upon hundreds of system administrators went through all sorts of grief dealing with it. And thousands of users went through grief trying to figure out what happened to their old newsgroups. To what purpose? I really feel that the actual purpose was for the cabal to stretch their muscles a little bit - to see if they really could change the entire USENET. And they did. Frightening. USENIX is supporting this, too, with the funding of groups like the Stargate project and the UUCP Mapping Project knowing that the final result will be power in the hands of a few. A more recent example of the work of this group is the final phase of the newsgroup renaming plan. The last step is for all the moderated groups to be renamed from "mod.<something>" to a specific name that doesn't include any indication that the group is moderated (a bad idea for many reasons, but, again, shrugged off by the main players in this game). As it turns out, the previous version of the netnews software doesn't handle moderated groups that aren't prefixed with the "mod." name. So the solution is to *force* all the administrators to change their systems. Totally regardless of whether they are actually willing and able to do it. Irrelevant of the fact that a lot of sites have administrators that don't even want to touch the netnews software, let alone go through the pain of updating to a new, incompatible, version. If they don't change, tough luck. Let 'em die. This is the kind of people that USENIX is funding to the tune of many thousands of dollars a year. (this is not to say that everyone associated with Stargate and the UUCP Mapping Project is like this, but I do believe that there are certain members that are influencing the projects adversely). An important question at this point is ``why is this happening? If the Unix community is indeed a democracy, why are people letting this transition take place?''. I feel that the major answers to this are that first off people just don't realize the dangers of power (or are so used to having arbitrary order imposed on them that they don't realize that USENET could be an anarchy) and secondly the cabal and related projects are getting explicit support and 'respectability' from the USENIX Assocation. For example, when I first heard of the Stargate project, I thought that it was an excellent idea. Then I heard about the 'changes' in the project as it evolved and started to question. But it was an officially funded project of the USENIX Association, of which I was and am still a member. So what can I do? Obviously greater minds than my own had ascertained that this was the appropriate direction to move in. It isn't, and I'm announcing my views here in this letter. I only hope that the board is receptive to this, and has the ability to state that the projects are indeed out of hand and that not only is the funding being withdrawn but any official or unofficial sanction and support of the projects and the cabal is withdrawn too. The crux, here, is that there is no reason why we can't have either free or minimal cost systems to allow a further upgrade path for Unix, UUCP, USENET, and so on. If there is interest I can outline solutions to both the UUCP Mapping Project goals and the Stargate project that would involved *zero* cost to the end user or an absolute minimal cost (for example I'm getting a newswire feed for HP Labs in the near future - UPI, AP, TASS, and about a dozen more services, at 9600 baud, 24 hours a day - for a cost of $20/site. I am further going to lease a satellite dish for $120/month, installation included. So why does Stargate expect us to pay so much? You can bet that the cost of newswire feeds is considerably more than USENET (AP alone is upwards of $650 a month for a direct feed)). Rather than bogging this down with technical details that are not appropriate, I'm going to talk more about the ramifications of USENIX supporting this sort of work for a bit... As an organization, USENIX has always been seen as a casual, fun, yet technically advanced users group. The publications have had a light touch, with humour and such, and the conferences always have good parties and all. An excellent organization overall. But the evil spectre of change looms and it seems that USENIX is so interested in becoming a "legitimate group" that we have lost our perspective on the original community that we're spawned from. So instead of spending the associations money on setting up, for example, a set of small hosts on either coast with a T1 dedicated line between them specifically for mail between the coasts (or something of that nature) they fund projects that moves Unix out of the anarchy and free software phase and into the EDP/pay-for-services phase of a system. It's something that may be inevitable, but NOT YET! We *can* solve these things without resorting to the changes we're funding currently. Moves like the spinoff of a new magazine for the association, a glossy with high-quality technical publications, is excellent *because it will be part of the membership fees*. IF it were to become a separate publication with a separate subscription price, however cheap, it would be a bad thing. And again, to pound on the same points again, the very fact that Stargate and, more especially, the UUCP Mapping Project require user funds is BAD. We must keep in mind that the very foundation of the Unix community is anarchy. No rules and no rulers. And there is no reason that we need change. This letter has become somewhat of a tirade against both the projects that the USENIX Association are funding and the explicit and implicit support of a power-hungry group of people active on the net. I apologize for the length of this message, but it really is vital that we discuss this openly. As a specific suggestion, I'd like to propose that this letter, along with a comment from each board member and the members of the USENIX projects be included in the next issue of ";login:". Also included should be a request for feedback from the members of the Association - this is sufficiently crucial that the entire organization could pivot on the ultimate outcome of this discussion and resulting decisions. To aid in this, I've also sent a copy of this message to Kevin Baranski- Walker, the new editor of ";login:". -- Dave Taylor taylor@hplabs.HP.COM