karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (05/31/89)
Would everyone do me a large favor? Please push your chair back away from your desk, take a deep breath, and relax. Go get yourself a Coke or a beer or <pick your favorite beverage> and reduce your blood pressure by a good ten points or more. Put your feet up for a few moments. De-hyperventilate a bit. Sheesh. A point or two, mostly reality injections. Ownership of mailing lists and/or newsgroups could be asserted to one degree or another. For example, Len could shut down the mailing lists unilaterally and decline to give anyone copies of the old alias files. "Possession is 9/10ths of the law" and other trite phrases apply. I don't think Len would do such a thing (he seems to be too mellow an individual, frankly), but he *could*. Similarly, I could bend a lot of people's minds out of shape by annihilating a dozen aliases from /usr/lib/aliases here, as well as a dozen lines in my sys file. That would dry up the info-gcc/gnu.gcc connection really fast - and thereby nothing written on gnu.gcc would ever reach RMS, since he gets this stuff via info-gcc rather than gnu.gcc. (In exactly identical terms, I "own" two mailing lists, firearms and firearms-politics. I exercise rather complete control over them, to the extent that I installed a "fire extinguisher" filter on firearms last week in order to forestall certain antisocial tendencies on the part of certain subscribers. I can permit or deny access to anyone I wish. And I daresay that there are no addresses of the form .*@apple.com in Len's alias files.) You will, of course, immediately inform me that you could recreate either the mailing lists or the gnu.* mail/news gateway yourself. True enough - post a note to the Usenet in suitable newsgroups, and you can resurrect the mailing lists; get a copy of Erik Fair's gateway code, and you can rebuild the mail/news gateway. However, in the process of doing so: [a] You will lose time, the most valuable of commodities; figuring out the configuration of the gateway alone will take you a month, working from scratch - it's deeply contorted stuff, hence the occasional breakages which we find and Bob gets fixed. It's amazing to think of the thousands of irritated people out there when breakages happen - and just think, *you* can take on the privilege of getting the flammable mail when it happens. (Bob does essentially all the news/mail gateway stuff - I am blissfully unaware of any but the highest-level configuration details.) [b] You will lose readers/participants, if for no other reasons than that many would stop participating without RMS' presence, or a lack of motivation to get re-subscribed to new mailing lists which might or might not be as well run as Len's. Granted, transport depends largely upon the ongoing largesse of governments and corporations which pay to push the bits around. But transport control != logistical control. It's been suggested that taxes paid over the past N years constitute repayment of debt for work done by CS researchers over that time period. That's like asking for first cause in the Palestinian debate. You're not going to get an answer, so stop asking the question. As for whether Apple's stuff belongs here or not, well, I've got an opinion but I'm going to be exceedingly diplomatic and refuse to say what it is. There are several issues to be considered beyond the fact of Apple's litigious tendencies. There is the question of whether anything done by FSF can be large enough to have an effect on Apple - it is entirely possible that there are simply far too many people out there buying MacSE's to use as "dumb" Macs who are completely unaware of the political outlook of either Apple or FSF, and those people may constitute the real financial base of Apple. In juxtaposition against that, there is the possibility that FSF could raise the level of awareness of exactly those people and hence become sufficiently "large" in their minds to have FSF's desired effect. The issue goes both ways. Pseudosupport of Apple via availability of FSF products could push the matter either way. But temper altitude and bad attitude won't do it, no matter whose side you're on. All I really want right now is for folks to answer RMS' question regarding how you feel about Apple, and for everyone to keep their tempers in check while this happens. A civil question was asked; a civil response is in order. Kindly keep the vulgarity and the generally bad attitudes between yourselves and your officemates; genuinely skillful use of obscenities is uniformly absent on the Internet. Distribute some useful data for FSF's consideration instead. --Karl Sysadmin of tut.cis.ohio-state.edu, Home of GNU mail/news gateway