Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!scs!spl1!laidbak!att!pacbell!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!hpda!hpcuhb!hpindda!atchison
From: atchison@hpindda.HP.COM (Lee Atchison)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: some (should-be) ground-rules for submissions to comp.binaries.*
Message-ID: <6500028@hpindda.HP.COM>
Date: 31 May 88 14:54:00 GMT
Article-I.D.: hpindda.6500028
References: <2689@utastro.UUCP>
Organization: HP Technical Networks, Cupertino, Calif.
Lines: 79

>/ hpindda:comp.sys.mac / mclek@dcatla.UUCP (Larry E. Kollar) / 11:41 am  May 27, 1988 /
>[I'm cross-posting to comp.sys.amiga since this applies to amiga binaries
>as well.]

Stupid reason to cross-post.  History has shown that cross posting ANYWHERE
is a dumb idea.  If you are going to cross-post, why not cross-post to the
ibm-pc binary group too?  What's so special about the Amiga's????

>To reduce the amount of binaries on the net, and to enhance the usefulness of
>what's posted, I propose the following scoring system:

BULL.

This obviously reflects your individual bias, as would any such system.
Deciding which postings are valuable should be up to the moderator.

>	Sources accompany submission:  +10

Why?  Many people don't care if source is included or not.

>	Public domain (as opposed to free copyrighted): +5

An unimportant distinction.  Many very good programs could NEVER be
distributed as shear public domain.  Take anything written in LSC (using
the UNIX libraries, at least).  They would, at the very least, require
the LSC copyright notice, even if the rest is PD.  Should these be considered
less important than programs written in another language??????

>	Binary < 20K:  +5
>	Binary < 50K:  +3 (a 10K binary has a score of +5, not +8)
>	Binary > 100K:  -3
>	Binary > 150K:  -5

A good decision making point.  Although usefullness of the program should
be of first concern, size is also a VERY important point.

>	Shareware:  -5

Some strange religious nuts would agree with this, I happen to think
shareware is a good idea.  The very concept of being able to look at software
before you buy is a good idea, even if most shareware authors haven't made
much money on it.

>	Demo of commercial program:  -10

A personally think that demos of commercial programs are a great idea.  They
benefit everyone.  The person who is thinking of buying the program gets a
free look before shelling out any money.  The person who likes the program
but can't afford to buy it gets a pseudo-working version for free (I'm
thinking of demos like the WriteNOW demo, for example), and the publisher
gets free advertising.

The only person possibly hurt is the person paying the phone bills for the
net.  They are hurt with all the trash on this net anyway.  If they are
worried about cutting costs, cut some of the garbage groups (I'll leave the
list of these to your imaginations to create, but one of them spells 'groups'
with an 'f').

>The Mac and Amiga are hard enough to learn to program;
>the until-recent dearth of example Mac sources didn't help.

There are a lot of non-programmers on this net who could care less about
source code.  Leave the source code for the source groups.  I would rather
see shorter examples of source code segments that do certain important things
(that are clearly commented and explained), then the unreadable source code
for a large project that I probably will never look at anyway.

>
>	Larry Kollar	...!gatech!dcatla!mclek
>----------


----
Lee Atchison
Hewlett Packard, Business Networks Division
Cupertino, CA 95014
atchison%hpindda@hplabs.hp.com

These opinions are my own, not of my employers.