mjs (04/17/83)
The most likely outcome of this "service" is that many more sites will
cease to forward mail on the basis that they aren't interested in
footing the bill for TWG's MR system. I agree heartily that any firm
interested in such a network-wide service had better be prepared to
poll each and every customer's site. A question I don't quite
understand the answer to is: Why do most sites arbitrarily forward
mail? Running netnews can increas productivity in certain fields, but
why mail?
Martin Shannon, Jr.
Phone: (201) 582-3199
Internet: mjs@mhb5b.uucp
UUCP: {allegra,rabbit,alice,mhb5b,mhb5c}!mjsswatt (04/17/83)
Certainly if I were offering such a service, I would insist on a direct connection with each subscribing site. I certainly would not want to entrust income-producing communications with customers to the vagaries of mail forwarding on the current net. - Alan S. Watt
crp (04/19/83)
Armando is right about commercial use of the net.
The only way the net will continue to to be the more-or-less
homogeneous and "free" service it is is if we all exercise good judgement
in our use of the net and exert negative feedback on those who abuse it.
The net exists because it fills a need at a price that sites have
been willing to pay (or they have left it.)
New product or service announcements (and a means of rendezvous, perhaps)
are something that almost all sites are interested in and are clearly
in the domain of interests that the net exists to satisfy.
Let us, by all means, continue to *hear* about products and services
from commercial sites (I work for one, after all).
I agree that commercial traffic (between a business and a customer)
must be paid for by the parties involved, though, and not the net as a whole.
Charlie Price -- NBI (The Word Processor Folks!) Boulder, Colorado
{allegra|ucbvax}!nbires!crpcyrus (04/19/83)
I strongly agree that the net should not become the backbone for commercial
endeavors. The only way their system, as suggested, could function was
with a direct link to each customer's site.
Where reliability, accountability, and verification are paramount
this act can only pave the way for more thoughtless net usage by these
so-called 'vendors'.
Personally, I think this ill-planned blunder is par for TWG.
-Cyrus ("EUNICE, it's no UNIX!") Azar
fortune!dsd!cyrus
ucbvax!atd!dsd!cyrusmark (04/20/83)
Good grief. What a lot of ado over nothing. Aside from the obvious confusions in the article between Usenet and "the UNIX network" and UUCP (I thought this was straightened out at Unicom: there is no such thing as a Usenet address, any more than getting the New York Times delivered at home implies that you have a New York Times address) this is pretty silly. There are an estimated 1500 UUCP nodes currently. Probably 25% or so of them are universities and nonprofit corporations, the rest are all companies with a service or product to offer. Should we make 3/4 of the net go away? TWG was not proposing to have every bug report posted to net.eunice (although, what with net.bugs, there is precedent for such an animal, I doubt many people want to read all the routine bug reports that are likely to be submitted), all they did was ask people to get in touch with them so that UUCP mail could be established. In other words, there will be some UUCP address that Eunice users can use to send bug reports to. Big deal. Berkeley has an electronic address for bug reports: ucbvax!4bsd-bugs. Western Electric has an electronic address for System V bug reports: nwuxc!ucsmail (I think - I can't find me card right now.) Nobody got upset over that. While Digital or any other site has the right to refuse to forward certain kinds of mail, I really doubt that it's going to bother most of us to have a convenient bug report mechanism. Many sites will set up a direct connection, but some sites will be unable to and will want to route it through others. I think the UNIX community as a whole benefits from having software available which is less buggy. -- Mark Horton