At 08:28 AM 2/3/99 +10, Debra Wilson wrote:

>or what if a software company should suddenly decide that they dont like or
>understand why one of their users is requesting certain information or
>services from them, banning the person or company would be kind of self
>defeating....

But this is essentially what many companies (hw & sw) do when they put you
on hold for hours when you try to get tech support. Or when they ship
betaware as gold and expect you to pay for upgrades when they finally get
around to fixing the bugs that you have reported to them. Or when they
decide to ignore RFCs and other standards when they design their email
software and servers (like Microsoft, AT&T, AOL and others) and expect you
to work around them.

So as list owners and site administrators we have to decide:

(1) if we want to emulate the worst practices of Microsoft and other
companies (a list of companies that I hereby explicitly exclude LSoft from)
by seeking to exclude people who should be members of our constituencies
because we demand that they buy in to the latest possible everything and in
the exact way that we demand no matter how it negatively impacts on their
ability to communicate with us

OR

(2) if we want to embrace the open communications that represent the best
of what the Internet can be.

If the choice is inclusionary or exclusionary, I will pick inclusionary
every time.

Karen Strauss
Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Network
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