Douglas,
I don't want to start a flame war or anything, but your facts just aren't
correct.
I developed LISTSERV in 1986 under the aegis of a university for which I
provided free system management services in return. So, I worked there
without pay, and in exchange, they let me use their IBM mainframe and
keep ownership of anything I might develop. This was a common arrangement
in Europe at the time, although since then universities have begun to
realize that, sometimes, these students develop very valuable things and
it is such a pity that the university doesn't get a share of the profits.
But back then, the thought that I might develop anything of value was so
remote that it wasn't considered by either party. Either way, I didn't
get my computer time for free; I had to work for it.
You couldn't get LISTSERV unless you were connected to BITNET/EARN and
had an IBM mainframe. Unfortunately, this doesn't equate to any kind of
patronage from any of these organizations. I did not receive funding, a
computer, or anything like that. I did receive encouragements, thank you
letters and the like, but you cannot pay the rent with that. I had to
work, like everyone else, for what I had.
EARN's only real contribution to LISTSERV is that they purchased licenses
in bulk in 1993, for which I was and still am very grateful, but by then
LISTSERV was already 7 years old. IBM generously invited me to meet
senior developers that customers normally have no access to, and I think
they even paid for one of these trips, although I no longer remember for
sure. BITNET (which by then was called CREN) tried to put me out of
business because, aahhh let's not get into that old stuff. It's very
difficult to understand if you weren't there at the time.
Grateful as I am for these contributions, they are at best meagre. The
French government made a far bigger contribution by footing the bill for
my studies. I got to attend one of the top universities in Europe for
free, although in reality that was funded by the taxes my parents paid
all their life. Nevertheless, I think there is a stronger case for saying
that French laws should apply to LISTSERV usage today than for expecting
the product to have to follow rules that BITNET, EARN or IBM had in the
80s.
Most of the LISTSERV backbone is academic sites, but rest assured that
your average commercial customer doesn't want its distributions to touch
the backbone. In a typical commercial scenario, money is lost if the
message isn't delivered, and the last thing you want is to hear that an
outage somewhere in an organization you have never even heard of is the
reason you might be losing your job today after your scheduled chat with
an angry VP. The backbone is used for lists such as this one, primarily
by universities. In the 80s or early 90s, when the backbone carried
almost all the traffic and was implemented with mainframes costing eight
figures, there was a clear economic aspect to the backbone, but at the
time there was no commercial usage on the network because there were no
commercial users. Today there is, in most cases, no actual cost for what
is left of the backbone, because it uses a couple percent of a
four-figure server that you needed to buy anyway. I am sure there are
exceptions here and there, for instance the central node at L-Soft is a
server that we would probably not have needed otherwise, and there may be
sites with older hardware where the backbone takes much more than a
couple percent.
As far as I can see, the only L-Soft award that went to a commercial list
is the one for e-mail marketing, which is a given. Technically, quite a
few universities do e-mail marketing nowadays, but you can rest assured
that they wouldn't want to come near an "e-mail marketing award" :-)
Likewise, the Educational award was guaranteed to go to an academic site,
and the rest were open. But the other awards ended up going to a variety
of non-profit lists, many of them hosted by universities. I wasn't on the
jury (in exchange, I get to pick the Grand Winner in a couple weeks), but
I heard that there were far more applications from academic sites, which
makes sense given the respective cultures of business and academia.
Universities also have to accept that others will review their research
and other projects, whereas corporate lawyers are not necessarily as
excited at the prospect that a third party will make public statements
about them.
The awards are not about "list ownership" per se, and we did not even
attempt to evaluate the skills of the list owner, at least not the skills
that I think you are thinking of. We would have had to subscribe to the
lists, start a couple flame wars, simulate broken mail clients and the
like. It could have been fun mind you, but I doubt the list owners would
have appreciated our efforts ;-) Although the list owner obviously plays
a central role, and bearing in mind again that I was not on the jury, I
think what we looked at is the big picture. The list members and editors
probably played as big a role as the list owners in the final outcome. We
awarded lists, not list owners.
I am sorry that you never got your T-shirt. If you e-mail me your address
(privately), I'll see if we still have any left - I think we still do in
some sizes, and since you don't plan on ever wearing it, any size should
do. Tell you what, to make up for the lost T-shirtless years, I'll have
it delivered in a dedicated frame if I find a small enough size, with the
plain (no logo) side of the shirt up, so you can hang it on a wall. No
other list owner will have a plain black T-shirt inexplicably framed in
his living room with the text "In memoriam flammarum" underneath. A
definite conversation piece and, who knows, perhaps a valuable
collector's item in 10 years or so?
Eric
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