> On Tue, 7 Dec 1993 12:35:18 CST Marty Hoag said:
> >   I fear that if CREN doesn't get off their duff and get moving on
> >the L-Soft stuff they are going to lose members faster than they ever
> >dreamed.  Instead of designing brochures I sure would have rather had
> >them completing the deal in the same timeframe that EARN did.
> Amen.  I don't need fancy brochures.  I need the new LISTSERV and LMAIL
> and I need them NOW.
> Harold
 
This has gotten me thinking whether we major LISTSERV sites should form
our own consortium to buy LISTSERV since CREN can't seem to be able to do
it's job.  Which led me further to the thought, do we need CREN at all if
we have to pay for LISTSERV?  Here are the steps that led to those ideas:
 
The main reason my site has stayed in BITNET so far are:
 
   (1) CREN used to claim that Internet connections cost too much for
   small sites.  But even our smallest BITNET sites in the state of
   Florida are also Internet-connected.
 
   (2) CREN pushed BITNET as a fall-back network if/when NSF
   pulled the plug on funding the Internet.  In reality, we now pay
   dues to the Internet regionals to make them self-funding.  And
   Internet use is so ingrained that we'd certainly pay more rather than
   lose Internet connectivity if NSF stopped funding its backbone.
 
   (3) We received LISTSERV and a workable VM Mailer for free.  But now
   they're not free, so if we've got to pay extra money to get LISTSERV
   and LMAIL, I'd rather pay it directly to the vendor (Eric) than to
   CREN which'd want extra to help pay for their bureacracy.  This is
   especially true if CREN won't have a LISTSERV support desk that
   will reduce the LISTSERV license cost or provide other value-add.
 
Since none of the original conditions that justified BITNET now exist,
I've got to wonder do we still need it?  From a cost-benefit perspective,
why pay both CREN dues and a LISTSERV license when I could be paying for
just a LISTSERV license?  And in these days (years!) of tight budgets, I'm
sure the departments on my campus who pay for jnet licenses would be glad
to put that money to other uses; we could similarly use our annual VMNET
license fee for something else.
 
Of course there are two well-known technical pieces of BITNET that aren't
widely available on the Internet: TELL/MSG and SENDFILE.  But there are
implemented TCP/IP equivalents of both of these.  I suspect that the
dismantling of BITNET would quickly spur their use, at first among former
BITNET sites, and then as clients & servers standardly-shipped by TCP/IP
vendors.
 
So I suspect the reasons for keeping BITNET at my site will become purely
political, i.e. without relation to technical or fiscal merits.
 
Well, that ought to stir things up.  -david
 
David Nessl -- Coordinator, Computer Systems (systems programmer)
Internet:  [log in to unmask]          |Northeast Regional Data Center
BITNET:    david@nervm            |112 SSRB, University of Florida
Telephone: 904-392-2061           |Gainesville, FL 32611    USA