Definition:
  LISTSERV   Eric's implementation of the concept of a list manager.
  LISTEARN   Turgut's implementation of a list manager that tries to
             be as much like LISTSERV as possible, in the *correct*
             and fair sense.  (Turgut/Eric, correct me if needed)
  Any other spelling and/or casing refers to applications trying to
  implement (to some extent) the CONCEPT behind Eric's LISTSERV, and
  to that concept itself.
 
On 21 Nov 1992 01:20:24 GMT [log in to unmask] (Alexander Dupuy - CS type mil
   itant) said:
...
>As I said before, I don't care about the naming issue.
 
Your privilege, and that of those with the same view.
 
From the USER point of view (assuming sufficient compatibility),
I'd like to see <LISTSERV@some_site>, to not confuse the USER.
But if I were an implementor, then it just wouldn't be fair to do
it without Eric's permission.
BTW, whether the name "LISTSERV" enjoys legal protection or not is
imho totally irrelevant; laws are just a subset of the morals/ethics
of a culture.
 
What upsets me most in the whole issue of LISTSERV and "listserv"s
is the enormous waste of time, energy, system resources in trying to
design (in)compatible "listserv"s, when it would have been so much
neater, cleaner, more useful to have all that manpower get together
and create a single "listserv" for as many opsyses as possible and
as compatible as possible with LISTSERV(/LISTEARN).
 
 
>efficient for large discussion groups, I say that not because it uses less
>resources overall, but because it makes better use of limited resources at the
>expense of wasting some which are abundant.
 
Whereas LISTSERV tries to reduce resource-use in an overall sense...
 
 
>Hosts which are happy to waste bandwidth will get fairly complete newsfeeds
>and won't care about articles that nobody reads.  Hosts on dialup UUCP links
>that care about their bandwidth will only carry the newsgroup if there are
>users at their site who are interested, and if they do, news will be more
>efficient than mail for them.
 
Will someone clue me in why there need to be so many hosts for
newsgroups if networks based on fulltime TCP/IP links *really* are
as good & fast as they are advertised to be?
Heck, the whole idea behind TCP/IP etc. is to obviate the need to
have everything available locally, isn't it?
 
 
>> I have trouble thinking of Alex as an end user rather than a CS-type
>> militant.
>I like this!  Thanks for the compliment!  I do favor strongly typed languages.
 
(Oh drat!  And I wanted to discuss REXX with you...)  (*grin*)
 
 
>           I find it ironic that Tasos and I are the ones arguing for as much
>subscriber-interface compatibility as possible between the BITNET and Internet
>worlds, while you and most of the rest of the Internet list-managers seem
>content to ignore each other's work, rather than trying to create a more
>powerful synthesis of the two (and no, this doesn't mean I want to force
>everybody's mail servers to be running the same implementation).
 
Um..  I myself would also like to see all these applications with a
similar goal reach some sort of common user-interface.  For the
nonce I'll settle for a REXX program that figures out for me whether
to use Ftp, Telnet, news, LISTSERV, listserv, Mailbase, gopher,
wais, SENDFILE, etc. to accomplish what I want, and then does its
thing without bugging me with the sordid details.
One simple syntax, useable by any person from "Mar(t)y Doe" on up
through gurus, on any opsys.  Then programmers can devise any syntax
they want for their application; the REXX program just does the
translation...
 
IMHO it's actually an absurdity that so many programmers do not
disseminate their ideas re application syntax to the widest possible
anticipated user-group before even considering implementation.
 
 
Regards.
$$/