>Subject: U Illinois Chicago computer center replies to Thomas > >Please keep in the back of your mind the fact that Eric Thomas (who >wrote the excruciatingly detailed technical story that that Dr. >Bledstein forwarded to ACADEMY) has a personal financial stake in >BITNET. He is the founder and owner of owner of L-SOFT Inc., the company >that markets LISTSERV software. LISTSERV is the package behind UIC's >highly successful "H-NET" and thousands of other worldwide "discussion >groups". Eric does a very good job of explaining BITNET's problems, but >at the same time he is using fear, paranoia and his vast network of >contacts (including those who run H-NET and other LISTSERV groups) as >marketing tools to promote his new products. Jim, I do not wish to enter into a public name calling contest. However, for the record, I do take objection to these gratuitous accusations on my integrity. You are free to have your own opinion of me, why I started LISTSERV, and why I decided to make it a commercial product. But I do have a problem when these opinions are presented in a public statement as though they were demonstrable facts. To take an uncontroversial (if trifling) example, you assert that I am the sole owner of L-Soft. While the fact that L-Soft is privately held is public knowledge, the list of shareholders and their respective stakes in the corporation has never been published. Unless you broke into our office (or our lawyers' office), you simply do not have access to information that would allow you to state that I am or am not sole owner of L-Soft. Not that a partial ownership changes anything to your opening remarks; I am merely pointing out that you took it upon yourself to make this statement, when in fact I believe I have said several times that there are other people behind L-Soft. You also appear to think that I have somehow used "contacts" at H-NET as "marketing tools" to promote LISTSERV. In fact I don't even know who runs the H-NET list, although obviously I know how to find out. I have not contacted anyone at H-NET and I can't see any financial reason for me to attempt to put pressure on a site that has already decided to purchase the products I am recommending, and that is the largest worldwide LISTSERV user. Why on earth would I want to hit one of L-Soft's very best customers? I did not know that H-NET had forwarded my message to others at UIC and I am sorry if this has caused you any trouble. All in all I think you are dismissing my technical remarks all too easily with simple attacks on my character. My message was based on facts. I was not trying to point the finger at UIC and I apologize if I gave this impression. I know from private discussions that you did the best with the resources you have at your disposal, and perhaps I should have mentioned this in my public message. The technical problems, however, remain. I have stated that UGA's load will increase significantly within the next 2 weeks or so due to the disconnection of the UICBIT-INTERBIT link. I stand by this statement. In 2-3 weeks we will know whether I was warning the network of a serious upcoming problem, or just using fear and paranoia for personal profit. People aren't stupid, and as you know it takes a lot longer than 2 weeks to get a PO through Purchasing. If I just made up an imaginary problem in the hope of scaring people into buying L-Soft products, and if I predicted that the storm would hit in 2 weeks, I would just be making a fool out of myself and hurting L-Soft. People would wait 2 weeks, see that nothing happened, and they would never believe me again. If you won't grant me integrity, then at least do consider conceding me a minimum of intelligence. As you know from UIC's own purchase decisions, people don't buy L-Soft's workstation products in order to help the BITNET core, they buy them because of a local policy to migrate to unix, or then because they realize they can save money by delivering their mail on a cheaper system. On top of that, universities (which form the bulk of BITNET) can't buy anything until this summer unless they had already budgeted it last year when the budgets were being made. The only thing I could get by scaring people off is a mass migration to Majordomo or other free utility, which is clearly not in my interest. In fact, one of the reasons I did not mention this problem before is that I did not have a solution for the *short-term*, and I did not want to scare people off. Above all, I did not want to say "We have a problem here, and the only way to solve it is for you to buy L-Soft's unix products", because, even if it were the case, I know just how bad this would have sounded. I was confident that I could develop a short-term solution, just as I developed the "second generation", distributed INTERBIT scheme several years ago, but convictions aren't worth much in the face of concrete problems. Now I have algorithms and code, I know where I'm headed, and I know it's something I can finish in a week by pushing aside all other projects should an emergency present itself. Naturally, it will be a trade off. If there were a simple, magic solution with no drawbacks, I would have implemented it years ago. I know that the changes will cause problems for a few sites, that in some cases they will be blamed on me, and that the sites in question may decide to abandon LISTSERV as a result. I am willing to take that risk because the changes will solve the problem on a global scale. Maybe I'm naive, but I believe in solving problems, not in abusing them for commercial profit. All I have to do right now to make big bucks is keep my big mouth shut and wait for the storm to hit. These load problems are caused by recent changes that were made by others, either without consulting me or against my recommendations. As the edifice collapse, all I'd have to do is say "Gee, what was it I kept telling you guys, but you wouldn't listen, now look what you've done". Then our salesmen would be calling the victims and letting them know how much a unix or TCP/IP LISTSERV license costs. And with thousands of people not getting their mail, I don't think they'd have much trouble closing the sales. The reason I mentioned all these problems on the list is that they are real, and so are the complaints about delivery delays and why problems in the BITNET core are affecting LISTSERV subscribers that are not on BITNET. There are many examples in the archives of LSTSRV-L and LSTOWN-L. Just as your users demanded an explanation and you had to give them one, L-Soft's customers wanted to know what was going on and I had to explain it. And I did not make insinuations about the character of other people or organizations. I wouldn't do that unless I could prove what I said. Again, I am working on algorithmic changes which will be available within a few weeks and which will solve the problems you and the other core sites are now facing, without requiring anyone to buy any unix product. If somehow there is a way to use these changes to force people to buy our unix products anyway, I would be most grateful if you would share the knowledge :-) Eric