On Sun, 22 Nov 1992 18:22:49 EST "A. Ralph Papakhian" <PAPAKHI@IUBVM>
said:
>For what it's worth, I would agree as well. I also observe that the
>Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) has now also advertized its
>own "listserv" which is (mostly) of the non-Eric Thomas kind. So now a
>large number of individuals in that coaltion are equally confused by the
>meaning of "listserv."
I realize I will probably sound cynical, but these "ethical" problems
Michael and you have mentioned often look surprisingly like "under cover"
political stances. Let's take the case of RARE - a european network of
which most european countries are a member. While most North American
users have never heard of RARE, this is by no means because it is a
small, or poor, network. One reason RARE is not very well known is that
it is OSI oriented, and another is that it doesn't really produce or do
much. RARE runs a lot of projects and working groups, some of which are
useful, some of which are not, it has issued the call for tenders for the
IXI network, which is almost unanimously considered as a major step
towards the NON use of OSI protocols by disenchanted users, and that's
about it.
RARE runs the Tasos server for their working group lists and main
secretariat, with limited success. Unfortunately, most of the people
involved in these groups have heard enough about me to know I wrote
LISTSERV, and I had the pleasure of being informed that "my" software
was, to put it nicely, a piece of cowdung - not that they expected
anything else from something originally written for IBM machines.
Both as a user of their working-group lists and as author of LISTSERV, I
would like them to either switch to Mailbase or let someone else run
their lists on LISTSERV. The other users of the lists often ask for the
same. Some of the working group chairs have announced that they want to
move their lists to Mailbase on another host due to all the problems they
had with 'listserv'. The vice-president of RARE asked to be removed from
all RARE mailing lists until the problems are solved. Here is a copy of
his letter:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 07:54:33 +0200
From: Juergen Harms <[log in to unmask]>
To: RARE Secretariate <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: RARE Council of Admininstration <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: "news" list
Autoforwarded: TRUE
Please remove my entry from all lists directly managed by RARE and send me
important information by fax or paper mail. I am ready to reconsider this
decision when the secretariate has made the proof that it knows how to
handle mailing lists, and in particular how to set the list up in a way
that non-delivery reports do not go to the entire list.
Juergen
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
So it seems we have a clear case: users want a change, some working group
chairs actually demand a change, even top executives want a change; the
EARN president formally asked RARE to consider switching to something
else, and I complained about end-user confusion and the fact that running
this software gives the impression that RARE passively condones a
delicate and ethically controversial attitude. Nothing happened.
RARE is a big network. Being funded both by members and by the EC, they
have quite a lot of money. Their budget is of several millions of ECU,
whereas EARN's is in hundreds of thousands (1 ECU = 1.x dollar). RARE has
a secretariat, they have staff, they have computers, they haven't got any
financial excuse for running a second-class electronic conferencing
service for their working groups, which after all are one of the main
reasons RARE exists.
EARN and RARE have some kind of formal cooperative agreement, in the
scope of which RARE could legitimately ask EARN to help them with their
mailing lists. I have myself offered to run up to 20 lists for them at no
cost, so that they could see the difference before deciding. Thank you
for your kind offer, which shall be given due consideration in due time.
Well you are free to draw your own conclusions, and I am sure the
official line is that RARE is working very hard on solving the problems
people are complaining about and regrets the existence of this ethical
issue but cannot do much about it, or something similar. However I am
left wondering how such a state of affairs can possibly exist unless
there are decision makers within the organization who enjoy the idea that
they are confusing (evil) EARN users while giving me a bad reputation
with the software of someone else. In fact, a working group member
suggested that, if I would just start praising the Tasos server and say
that Mailbase creates abominable problems to EARN users, it wouldn't take
long for RARE to switch to Mailbase :-)
Now, the most ridiculous thing is that this whole ethical debates centres
on two pretty simple requirements: not having the software identify
itself as 'unix listserv version x.y' or anything which can otherwise
cause users to think this is the same thing as the VM LISTSERV, and not
having ambiguous statements in the documentation like "this is an
implementation of the BITNET LISTSERV for unix". The programs are not
compatible, they don't share the same protocols, they haven't got one
byte of source code in common, they are about as similar as unix and VMS,
calling the unix code an "implementation of the BITNET LISTSERV for unix"
is like saying unix is an implementation of VMS for the SPARCstation. In
the academic world such considerations are taken for granted, it is
simply part of the tradition of scientific research. Sadly, the
permeability of certain categories of computer professionals to their
environment being what it is, we have reached a situation where a "gang"
of such people are taking pleasure in running software which causes
trouble to users whose only crime is to visit a different software
church, or indeed most of the time to visit no such church at all, when
their higher management (usually taken from the academic culture) would
quickly prohibit them from running this software if they only knew about
the ethical struggle. This in turn can give a bad reputation to the moral
principles of entire organizations when only a small number of
individuals are concerned.
And I think I have now wasted enough time on this 'listserv'.
Eric
|
