mangler@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (System Mangler) (03/20/87)
I think the Stargate folks need to state a clear and unambiguous
policy on the extent of redistribution allowed.
So far, the only case considered has been feeds to unrelated neighbors,
and the Stargate folks seem inclined to disallow this.
A more subtle variant is feeding another organization under the same
administrative umbrella. Can one NASA site send Stargate materials
to another? Can Caltech trade such materials back and forth with
JPL, a NASA facility which is nominally administered by Caltech?
Many companies/universities have one main news machine that fetches
the news on behalf of the whole organization, minimizing the cost.
If Stargate requires that each machine in the organization pay for
its own newsfeed, it quickly becomes uneconomical.
Can different campuses of the same company/university redistribute
Stargate materials over their tie-lines? How about different
divisions of the same campus? How about different machines?
How about cluster of workstations and their server?
Nntp further blurs the distinctions: who's allowed to read news
off one's central nntp server, which may easily have 100 readers
using rrn? I can imagine situations like "sorry, SIS doesn't
allow us to feed you, but you can use us as an rrn server host"
(probably leading to the clandestine development of a "nntppoll"
to slurp up all the articles) or the more restrictive "sorry,
you can't read news from the comfort of your workstation, you
can only do it on the central news machine".
Where do you draw the line? There had better be one! If you
make it very restrictive, Stargate will be out of the question
for organizations with many machines; if you make it very
permissive, sales will be limited to one per organization.
If the line is fuzzy, the lawyers will have a field day. I can
imagine computer clubs incorporated for the express purpose of
sharing a Stargate feed.
Don Speck speck@vlsi.caltech.edu {seismo,rutgers,ames}!cit-vax!speck