gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore) (10/29/85)
In article <1718@gatech.CSNET>, spaf@gatech.CSNET (Gene Spafford) writes: > And we have all noticed how you have worked at maintaining a > major news feed, and justified the costs to your administration. We've > noted how you've helped write and debug the news software, maintain the > newsgroups, write tutorials for new users, answer thousands of > questions by mail, and otherwise contribute to the general welfare. > Your many constructive comments and suggestions in groups other than > net.flame have been recognized by many. I'm not running down your contributions to the net, Gene. A history of good work and service requires us to look again when you do something that appears to be outside of reasonable bounds. But it doesn't require us to rubber-stamp your actions as "the right thing to do". I think that the deletion of newsgroups should require roughly the same "due process" work as the creation of newsgroups. Whether or not you or an as-yet unnamed group of "backbone" admins thinks somebody did something "illegal" or not. I think the whole process of deciding what becomes of the "internationalization of Unix" discussion could have been carried out in much more sedate circumstances had you not announced the group's demise and then sent out an rmgroup before any discussion could propagate across the net. I can see a group of backbone admins having some vested interest in zapping net.bizzare, since it was costing them money and they are free to choose not to spend it. But did the same group of admins really feel about net.internat the same way they did about net.bizzare? A total of 61 messages have reached my site, and none were long.