vcerf@NRI.RESTON.VA.US (04/19/91)
I am going to take advantage of the several lists involved in this exchange to suggest to all of you a modus operandi in dealing with "advertising" versus "informing." If a mailing list is set up and the members are informed when they join that the list is either intended for or will be subject to unsolicited product announcements, then the prospective list member has the option to decide whether to subscribe. Quite apart from any appropriate use rules which may apply to the various underlying networks supporting the Internet, it seems to me that list usage ought to be in conformance with list member ground rules. So far as I am aware, isode was not set up for the purpose of tracking commercial products. I suggest that if there are members of isode who would find this helpful, a new list be created for that purpose and that prospective members be advised of this. There will surely be times on isode and other lists where a question about available solutions to a problem appears on the list and the answer involves a commercially available product. At that point, the vendor of the product has the option to respond privately to the party in question. A third-party who does not profit from mentioning existing commercial products could probably respond to the list for information purposes without raising questions, but would be well-advised to keep the response terse and to suggest that interested parties deal with vendors off the list. Hope this is of some help. Vint
tebbutt@RHINO.NCSL.NIST.GOV (John Tebbutt) (04/19/91)
>Hope this is of some help. > >Vint Vint, You have crystallized my thoughts eloquently. :^) Your suggestions are completely in line with established practice and standards of common courtesy, and I, for one, welcome them. Needless to say, I agree 100%. JT
shia@dset.UUCP (Dan Shia) (05/05/91)
Vint, Sorry for the late response, but I have just got the time to clean up my email backlogs. It is always difficult to draw the line where "informing" ends and "advertizing" starts. Your guidelines of Internet usage would be very helpful. The original email triggered this discussion was sent to the "dset!dsg" discussion group (this is not the "isode" discussion group), where the following message is posted periodically: This is a discussion group about current research and development issues about distributed computing, object-oriented programming, concurrent programming, and special issues regarding our Distributed Systems Generator (DSG). If you don't want to be in this group, please send me an email and I will be happy to remove your name from this group. I think it was in line with your suggestion. Your suggestion of setting up a discussion group about commercial products related to ISODE certainly will benefit many ISODE users. I will be happy to join it if someone else can setup one. Thanks. Dan