bobh@pedsgd.UUCP (Bob Halloran) (10/24/85)
Recent postings have dealt with the creation of an 'illicit'
newsgroup, net.internat, dealing with the issues of software porting
to non-English-speaking environments. Comments by Gene Spafford to
the effect that standard group-creation protocol had not been followed
were followed by his posting of a rmgroup message.
In past messages, Gene has made comments about actions taken
by the 'backbone' sysops 'for the good of the net', or words to that
effect. Having seen a posting from Europe stating that this group was,
in fact, recommended at a meeting of EUUG, the European equivalent of
Usenix, and created on that basis, I cannot help but wonder whether or
not there is a certain amount of 'Amurricanism' going on here, or
simply a power-play on the part of the net gurus to restrict traffic.
If the North American powers-that-be can decide to move all the
ARPA 'fa' groups over to 'mod' on the basis of a meeting at Usenix,
etc., I find it hard to accept that the European community cannot
create a new group for discussion of pertinent TECHNICAL topics;
we're not talking about a new net.bizarre/flame/etc. sinkhole here,
but a technical forum on multi-lingual software issues.
As a developer working for a firm with international
customers, it is in my interest to know what options are being
considered for multi-national applications. For this reason,
I feel restriction of this topic to non-North American sites
is unreasonable. For the record, as news admin at this site,
I have ignored the rmgroup request on net.internat, and suggest
that the backbone powers-that-be, especially those commercial
sites with involvement overseas, consider holding on to this group.
Bob Halloran
Sr MTS, Perkin-Elmer DSG
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