emv@msen.com (Ed Vielmetti) (06/19/91)
in the near future, postings to comp.archives are going to be tagged with an explicit copyright notice. [*] this is a step in the direction of making this service fully self-supporting, with enough resources readily available to the project so that I can afford to keep it going. as i posted in an article to comp.archives a few months ago, unless my work on this starts to yield some results, i'm going to stop distributing my efforts far and wide for free. free distribution of comp.archives is currently expected to continue to the end of the year; if things haven't worked their way out to my satisfaction, i expect to step down from moderating comp.archives some time not too long after the winter Usenix meeting. no specific dates set yet. there are several very good reasons to stick a copyright notice of some kind on the materials which i have collected and organized for on the order of 18 months now. first and foremost, comp.archives needs some better publicity and name recognition. it's somewhat embarrassing to have people still asking how it's produced, that there's some sense that it's magic or just automatic processing that's going on. explicit copyrights will start to clue people in on just what it is they are looking at -- a production not only of some technology but also of considerable human creative input. explicit assertion of copyright will assist me in gaining cooperation from resource providers who might be interested in producing services which were derived from my efforts. these might be on-line searchable databases, services which offered direct hands-off delivery of successful searches by anonymous ftp or uucp transfer, caches of information dynamically updated from comp.archives postings, or paper or cd-rom products that would incorporate materials derived from comp.archives. in addition, it will enable my work to be properly credited by other researchers who are working on the "resource discovery" problem; rather than them simply saying "we searched through netnews for interesting stuff and found a lot of it, so our search stuff must be pretty good", i would expect proper credit and attribution and recognition of the substantial progress made thus far. i expect that in the same timeframe that postings to comp.archives will also be cross-posted to a new group, with the tentative name "msen.internet.archives". MSEN, Inc. will be the publisher of materials in the msen.* hierarchy; I expect to be doing this for the benefit of our operations and that of our customers and strategic partners, and these groups will be fed in accordance with that policy. I have developed a considerable amount of expertise in this area, and expect to populate the msen.* hierarchy with interesting, insightful, and consistently high quality information. Some people who really enjoy reading comp.archives right be cut off from it for some amount of time. I'm content for that to happen; for my own needs, I can do all of the filtering and searching and sorting on netnews and just hoard that knowlege all to myself. It would be much easier to do that rather than spend the extra time adding all of the extra information, verifying that thigs are really there, editing down really long posting etc. That's where too much time is spent right now, and where support from people using that information is going to help me assess whether it's worthwhile continuing. If you are currently building any services based on comp.archives (other than strictly personal use), please contact me and let me know what your plans are so that we can assure their continued viability on into 1992. if you considered building such services and rejected the notion, let me know what the limitations of the current data stream are and what you would like to see in the future. MSEN Inc., if it ever gets sufficiently successful to actually pay any of its current employees instead of draining their own personal bank accounts :-(, will be looking for skilled people to fill a position of Internet Archivist. (Save your resumes, at the current rate of progress it's a ways off.) So far as I can tell, none of the commercial internet providers as of yet have anyone filling this role; Cerfnet and ANS has nothing along this line, UUNET's generic title is "postmaster", and everyone at PSI is working on X.500. It would make me quite happy if when we finally got to the point of hiring for this position, all of the good people had been snapped up; not too likely as far as I can tell. I would also be happy to pursue joint development work with archivists to develop dictionaries or other classifiction schema and to further the state of the art in searching and text retrieval systems. I ran across an estimate that it costs all told $200 to put together a single complete Library of Congress card catalog entry. If you look at the sustained production of about a dozen entries daily in comp.archives and value it at this at this rate, that's an estimate of the potential value of this project at about $750,000 to $1M per year. I believe that MSEN could deliver this service extremely well with that sort of a budget, that it would be money well spent, and that it would be best for everyone involved if the end product wasn't burdened by any nasty copyright nonsense. Unfortunately, the current "Interim MSEN" plans don't have a large pile of money falling out of the sky, and the realities of doing this much work for nothing are starting to catch up on me. I hope very much that things will work out well, and if they don't, well it's been fun. -- Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, MSEN Inc. emv@msen.com "With all of the attention and publicity focused on gigabit networks, not much notice has been given to small and largely unfunded research efforts which are studying innovative approaches for dealing with technical issues within the constraints of economic science." RFC 1216 [*] Pointers to materials available under the GNU Public License will of course be freely redistributable; MSEN will not assert any copyright or place any restrictions over their redistribution, and I'll continue to try to track GNU project announcements even if I give up free distribution of everything else.
bcarter@claven.idbsu.edu (Bruce Carter) (06/27/91)
In article <56075900D99F401D02@vms.cis.pitt.edu> emv@msen.com (Ed Vielmetti) writes: >in the near future, postings to comp.archives are going to be tagged >with an explicit copyright notice. [*] this is a step in the direction of >making this service fully self-supporting, with enough resources >readily available to the project so that I can afford to keep it >going. as i posted in an article to comp.archives a few months ago, >unless my work on this starts to yield some results, i'm going to stop >distributing my efforts far and wide for free. free distribution of >comp.archives is currently expected to continue to the end of the >year; if things haven't worked their way out to my satisfaction, i >expect to step down from moderating comp.archives some time not too >long after the winter Usenix meeting. no specific dates set yet. While I don't disagree with anyone trying to make a buck (or even break even) if this sort of thing becomes popular (there are a few who do this on the commercial services) I think you may see signature files similar to the following popping up. <-> Bruce Carter, Courseware Development Coordinator bcarter@claven.idbsu.edu Boise State University, Boise, ID 83725 duscarte@idbsu.bitnet Copyright (C) 1991 Bruce A. Carter-All Rights Reserved (208)385-1250@phone **** This material may not be redistributed under a compilation copyright ****