On Thu, 14 Mar 1996 16:54:45 EST Eric Thomas said:
>
>As far as BITNET is concerned, while there is clearly a risk of seeing a
>messy and uncoordinated shutdown, as Ulrich said it would be premature to
>draw final conclusions. The vital BITNET coordination functions are
>actually provided by a small group of people, currently organized under
>the GUMNCC umbrella. The GUMNCC is a Terena operational task force, or
>whatever the official buzzword is (Terena is the organization resulting
>from the merger of EARN and RARE). CREN pays Terena/GUMNCC for its share
>of this service, but the money can be found elsewhere. As CREN gets out
>of the NJE business, I expect that Terena and the GUMNCC will begin
>offering NJE connectivity directly to US organizations. If for whatever
>reason Terena decides to shut down BITNET in Europe as well, the handful
>of people that make up the GUMNCC can simply reorganize themselves
>differently and provide the service anyway. All that is needed is a
>billing entity, and any of the GUMNCC people's employers could arrange
>that easily (assuming they want to, which is another matter, but it's not
>like a simple billing issue is going to stand in the way of keeping
>BITNET alive for people who still need it). On top of that, it would
>probably be a lot cheaper than people are currently paying for BITNET
>access. I hesitate to give figures that I know someone will later quote
>against me :-), but I imagine that $500/year for one node and $1k/year
>for 2-10 nodes would be sufficient to recover costs even if a lot of
>sites were to leave. I don't think anyone in the US is paying less than
>that currently.
my intention even goes a bit further : the NJE coordination has to be
free of charge for the currently paying contributors of the GUMNCC (this
includes of course CREN-members) for the time after 31.12.1996. who or
which organization will finally take the sponsorship, is a different
issue, which doesn't need to be discussed here.
i have however some difficulties in putting this proposal into wordings
which are acceptable for Terena (for taking the sponsorship).
>
>I know that this was already tried in the past without success, but at
>the time there was a rigid political infrastructure that just got in the
>way. There were relationships to be preserved, and the newly formed
>Terena organization was trying to organize itself and define chains of
>command, etc. Terena's management ended up deciding against the proposal,
>and Terena was employing most of the people in the GUMNCC, so they had to
>do as Terena said. As you may know, these people were later laid off :-(,
>but the upside is that the current GUMNCC is free from any such influence
>:-)
not yet ;-) note, that i'm currently working contracted by Terena.
> So I am confident that this problem can be solved. On the other hand,
>nothing ever happens overnight with Terena, so we'll have to be patient.
i can only agree to eric (i'm very confident too ;-) but that's not new
isn't it ;-)
-ulrich-
(in order to be on the safe site, i need to write the following
disclaimer : this reply does NOT come from the GUMNCC management, but
from Ulrich Giese, Kranenburg, Germany)
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