On Tue, 15 Sep 1992 15:37:29 GMT Richard Alan Schafer
<[log in to unmask]> said:
>The LISTSERV license agreement grants a free license to CREN, EARN,
>etc., members, and mentions that a paid license would be required for
>anyone else. I know Eric has asked sites who left BITNET to stop running
>LISTSERV, since they're no longer CREN members. If such a site wanted to
>continue running LISTSERV, what would be the charge for doing so? Could
>that site still communicate with other LISTSERVs if the only
>connectivity was non-NJE?
I'll answer the second question first: LISTSERV is built for BITNET and
designed around its strong points. Furthermore it is an integrated system
- most of the functions rely on other functions to get their work done.
The ability of backbone servers to know about the lists hosted by other
servers relies on DISTRIBUTE, which relies on the topology information in
BITEARN NODES and on the server information in PEERS NAMES. The latter
relies on the file server functions for maintenance, and the file server
functions rely on DISTRIBUTE for delivery. If you take away one of the
components, you lose most of the functionality.
With no access to BITNET, there is no BITEARN NODES, no PEERS NAMES, no
topology information and hence no DISTRIBUTE. That's many components
missing, and the result is that all network-wide functions are gone.
LISTSERV can still run of course, but only in local mode - it will think
it is the only server in the world, and DISTRIBUTE will be turned into a
sophisticated pipe to the mailer.
I do not call that very useful, and that is one of the reasons why the
cost of a license for non-NJE sites is pretty low (to stay on the safe
side I won't give any figure, but it's less than 1 year of BITNET
membership for a OTC license). But the main reason is that I am doing
that only as a favour to former BITNET node administrators whose
management decided to pull the plug, or who moved to greener pastures.
These are people who understand the limitations and know what needs to be
done to make LISTSERV work outside BITNET (nothing extraordinarily
difficult, but it's not trivial and there is zilch documentation in
support of non-BITNET sites). Another important point is that I do not
support non-BITNET sites, and they cannot get new versions or fixes
automatically via NJE. This means I have to get the data to them myself,
and the procedures for doing that are NOT convenient at all. The Internet
being what it is, I have a choice between putting the software on an
anonymous FTP directory (simply out of question), giving them a logon
password for SEARN (unacceptable - in fact I don't even run an FTP
server), demanding that they give me a password on their machine (usually
unacceptable), or cutting the data into 50+ pieces small enough not to
upset SMTP servers and other mail gateways and sending them as mail. But
then as we all know the Internet doesn't need an unsolicited bulk data
transfer protocol - it has been doing just fine without one for so many
years, quite obviously it doesn't need one.
Anyway, this works because there are very few such licenses and because
the people in question are competent and do not cause me a great deal of
work. The day either condition stops being true, the price will have to
go up or I will stop selling. I am not interested in spending my time
helping people to coerce software into working in degraded mode in an
environment it was not designed to operate with! If furthermore this is
used as an excuse by short-sighted executives to disconnect from BITNET
to save a few thousands a year ("FTP can replace SENDFILE, TALK can
replace TELL and LISTSERV will remain"), I will just quit licensing to
non-BITNET sites.
Eric
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