brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (04/30/88)
It's quite true that there's nothing wrong with a commercial demo if it is truly useful, but you have to look at the scale here. The posting cost almost $6,000 to transmit. How many sites on the net have circuit designers doing small circuits who might find this demo useful? I have seen a couple of postings indicating such people, and a lot of postings from people who didn't even know what SPICE is. Were there 100 such *sites*? I sincerely doubt it. Even if there were that many, then it cost $60/site to transmit it. There are far more efficient methods, like regular mail -- even overnight couriers -- that are much cheaper and more reliable than this. And I suspect the cost was more like $200 per site that actually took the program and is now using it. Now this applies to any posting. Before posting any binary, one should consider if there are more efficient methods of distributing it. In this case, "I have a PSPICE demo. Send me 3 disks and a SASE" would have been the thing to do. Or even "Send me $30 and I'll copy it." Or drop it off with places like PC-Sig that will do it for $6/disk. Or put it somewhere with anonymous telebit uucp login and/or ftp. The only thing special about a commercial demo is that such programs have other methods of distribution, and the net isn't the right one In fact, I would guess (correct me if I'm wrong) that whoever makes PSPICE will send you the demo for a nominal fee, perhaps with some docs, even. If the demo were to be just an ad, I think it would be appropriate to ask permission of all long distance forwarding sites before posting it. Net people generally do want to see one-time ads and product announcements, news, support and other such commercial information, but 770K stretches this a bit. A lot. So before you post, (although soon the moderator will be in place) think if another form of distribution might be cheaper for the net. Not cheaper for you or easier for you, but better for those of us out here. I'm one of the many sites lucky enough to have a local backbone site for a feed. But they recently requested that all their feeds get telebits to reduce phone time, and I did, to the tune of $1200. So even a free feed pays the cost of excess wastage. I still haven't heard this dweeb apologize. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473