ksh@cbosgd.UUCP (08/31/83)
As some of you may remember, about a month or so ago I posted an article to net.general asking for comments on a UUCP mail routing service. This would have been a service, run by me, that would produce an up-to-date UUCP map for sale. The response was rather varied, and I will summarize it here. First of all, people largely misunderstood what was proposed and the flames were rather intense for several days (I'm still rather singed). Some people thought that I was going to sell the Usenet Compact Directory that I have worked on for over a year and I provide to the net free of charge. This is a ridiculous idea, and the number of people who did not know the difference between UUCP and Usenet astounded me. Secondly, there were the people that thought this service already existed, and I was using Usenet to advertise it. As stated in the original article, this was merely an idea, not something that already exists. Thirdly, many people thought that I work for Bell Labs and was trying to do this in my spare time. This was probably an understandable mistake since the machine I post to the net from is a Bell Labs machine. The only connection I have to Bell Labs is that they allow me to use cbosgd to maintain the Usenet Compact Directory, and my husband, Mark Horton works for Bell Labs. That was another misunderstanding - that Mark would be involved in the business. Granted, his name was mentioned in the original article, but it was mentioned as having helped develop the Usenet Directory, and I made it clear that the UUCP business idea would have nothing to do with him. And last, there were the people that thought that since I do the Usenet Directory for free, my time is therefore, worth nothing. I will not comment any further on this statement because it really makes me want to punch something when I think about it. Anyway, the overwhelming majority of the people that responded, thought it was a good idea. Some people presented some rather interesting legal issues that they were concerned with - some of which would have to be thoroughly investigated if this were to ever happen. I really want to thank the people that took the time to respond courteously and provide their thoughts on this idea. But a very positive result of this is that Rob Kolstad is going to try to put something together and distribute it for free. You may have noticed a trial distribution in net.news.map in the last day or so, and he hopes to have some kind of method where people can automatically update the database ready by spring. Since the primary concern was to have this data available to the network, I'm happy to lend my support to Rob and would like to encourage the rest of the net to do likewise. Karen Summers-Horton