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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gatech!royt
From: royt@gatech.CSNET (Roy M Turner)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: Removing Macintosh related groups from the net.
Message-ID: <1852@gatech.CSNET>
Date: Sun, 3-Nov-85 14:08:26 EST
Article-I.D.: gatech.1852
Posted: Sun Nov  3 14:08:26 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 4-Nov-85 02:31:41 EST
References: <226@mplvax.UUCP> <6100@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: royt@gatech.UUCP (Roy M Turner)
Organization: School of Information and Computer Science, Georgia Tech, Atlanta
Lines: 40

In article <6100@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>
>Have you considered mailing floppies as an alternative?  It's a LOT cheaper,
>and it means that the bills are paid by you rather than by others.  You are
>ignoring the fact that many of the sites paying the bills are *not* using
>the Macintosh in Unix-related work.  It sounds like interesting stuff, but
>why exactly should I pay for voluminous newsgroups related to it?
>  


So don't pay for it--your site has the option of which newsgroups it carries
for its users, and which ones it passes along to any other site that gets
news from you.  If you don't want net.sources.mac, then work it out with 
your own users.  If each site did this, including the backbone sites, 
then perhaps the net would be better off.

As it happens, I use the MacIntosh for the same reason that I use Unix--to
get some work done. Many of the postings to net.sources.mac have been of 
use in this--and a good many of them were (dare I say it?) shareware.  I
whole-heartedly hope that the current yelling and gnashing of teeth about
net.sources.mac doesn't result in it disappearing; perhaps you and people 
with similar views, that is, non-Mac users who are concerned with other
sites' phone bills, will be pleased, but I certainly won't.  Not all of
us are in the financial position to go out and buy software for every
need--the network fills that gap between need and means nicely.

It's been pointed out before, but bears repeating:  why get rid of a
newsgroup that serves a useful purpose (all right, not to everyone, but *I*
don't find the Unix newsgroups that useful, either, most of the time, so
there!), and keep drivel like net.origins, net.flame, etc., etc., ad
nauseum?  I'm not complaining about those groups--I don't read them, and if
I were the one worried about phone bills at my site, I would look hard and
long at dropping them; but I am not going to propose dropping them from the
network because such and such's site has a large phone bill--that is their
business and their concern.

Hmmm...I suppose you could consider this a vote in favor of keeping
net.sources.mac :-).

Roy