To all of those doing battle:
 
The subscribers to the various lists do not give a damn what they are
running on.  Or how they are peered.  Or whether they conform to this
or that protocol. What they do care about is the set of commands
with which they are expected to interact with the list.
 
Hundreds of listowners have poured countless hours into educating their
subscribers on how to send commands to a listserv of the Eric
Thomas variety. While Eric may not have a legal right to the term
listserv, the individuals running list management software on non-VM
platforms have an obligation to the user community to either support the
set of end-user commands from the Eric Thomas Listserv, or to call their
list management software something other than a listserv.  In other words,
if your list management software does not support an account called
LISTSERV to which the user is expected to send a set of commands which
are identical to the set which Eric uses,
then it ain't a listserv.  And calling it a listserv is false and
misleading to the end user.
 
Howard Psaternack
Brown University