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From: tdn@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Thomas Newton)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac,net.micro.amiga,net.news.group
Subject: Re: commercialism and net.micro.amiga going the way of .mac
Message-ID: <477@spice.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Fri, 1-Nov-85 06:32:30 EST
Article-I.D.: spice.477
Posted: Fri Nov  1 06:32:30 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 3-Nov-85 09:12:23 EST
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 36
Xref: watmath net.micro.mac:3239 net.micro.amiga:578 net.news.group:4212

What's wrong with the technical postings by Commodore to net.micro.amiga?
If development software and manuals were only available to developers (as
one post claimed), I could see your point.  But in fact a C compiler, an
assembler, and manuals will be available for sale to end users shortly.
The technical postings thus do not benefit only developers but anyone who
plans to do any sort of programming at all on the Amiga (including people
who want to hook it up to Unix systems, if Unix is all you care about).

I suppose you would also say that Larry Rosenstein (lsr@apple) should not be
allowed to post to net.micro.mac simply because he works for Apple.  Yet, he
posts very useful information and I for one am thankful for his participation
in net.micro.mac.  As long as the people working for Apple and Commodore post
technical information, rather than advertising copy, I don't see the problem.

I see that you consider program sources to be undesirable.  However, I would
venture to guess that program sources (or binaries) are much more useful than
the material posted in net.flame, net.politics, net.religion, etc.  I do not
see the logic behind trying to restrict useful groups that are successful when
these three flamage groups account for a fairly large amount of net traffic.

> Quite honestly, the only real solution I see to the current net malaise,
> is to retrench ourselves into a pure UNIX network, with moderated feeds
> from other interest groups, and perhaps even with full moderation on all
> groups.

Is it correct to interpret this as "only UNIX newsgroups and fa.* newsgroups
(excuse me, some of the mod.* newsgroups) will remain"?  If this is the case,
I don't think you'll need to worry about phone costs destroying the net since
there won't be much of a net left to destroy.  I realize that backbone sites
bear large parts of the cost of the net and therefore have a lot of say in how
it is run.  But it seems to me that the goal should be "acceptable cost and a
high signal-to-noise ratio" rather than "minimal cost" (which if followed to
its ultimate conclusion would require completely eliminating the net).

                                        -- Thomas Newton
                                           Thomas.Newton@spice.cs.cmu.edu